A woman in a neon yellow racerback tank top printed with Tattoos Are The New Tan, showing a black and grey sleeve tattoo on her upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeve tattoo beside a slogan tank top

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a neon yellow racerback tank top stands facing the camera, with her face cropped out of the frame. The printed black slogan reads Tattoos Are The New Tan, and a sleeve tattoo covers her arm from the upper arm to the wrist. The ink appears mainly black and grey, with shading against a plain light background.

Upper arm Forearm Slogan Sleeve Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on our side of the valley had seen a tan since August, so when Mair Pritchard walked into the mart office in January wearing a neon vest with TATTOOS ARE THE NEW TAN across the front, my father put down his pen and read it twice. "She's not wrong about the tattoos," he said. "Gethin's been at it since Christmas." That was the first we'd heard about the sleeve.

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Gethin had done most of it himself at the kitchen table, with a second-hand machine bought off a lad in Aberystwyth and the kettle going cold at his elbow. Three Sundays it took. Mam refused to watch and kept wandering in to check whether the ewes had been fed, which they had, because she'd already done it twice. By the end of February the shading was finished, black at the shoulder and thinning to grey past the wrist, like frost lifting off a hedge in the morning.

Lambing started in March, in the wet and the dark, and nobody had time to look at anybody's arms. Then the first warm morning came, the yard steaming gently under a thin sun, and Gethin came out of the lambing shed with his sleeves shoved to the elbow. Mam looked at the ink for a long while and said nothing. "The rest of us are still the colour of skimmed milk," she said at last, picking up the feed bucket. "You'll have to tell the mart it's the new tan."