Sugar skull pin-up and nautical star on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sugar skull pin-up woman with a sculpted hairstyle fills the centre of the sleeve, with detailed grey shading on the face and ornate floral designs. A large red and grey nautical star sits above her, with a partly visible wooden barrel background bearing Jack Daniel's lettering. A Harley-Davidson Motor Cycles shield and the letters FTW sit lower on the arm, with the red lips and star providing the main colour against black and grey.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Sugar skull Pin-up Woman Portrait Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the still in the old lime-washed cellar below the refectory, and for thirty years he had told the novices that a barrel only keeps what you put into it. Nobody believed him until the summer the painter arrived.

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She came up the lane on a borrowed motorbike with a crate of sugar skulls and a sketchbook, a woman who had been asked to leave three towns for painting saints with lipstick. Anselm let her into the cellar because the abbot had sold the last cask to a man from Plymouth and wanted something on the wall to look at while the rest matured. She painted a woman with a sculpted quiff and a face like a cracked plate, one half bone and the other half flesh, her red mouth pressed shut as if she knew something about the bishop.

On the last evening she pinned a brass star above the woman's head, the sort sailors cut into their knuckles to mean they had come home. Anselm asked what it meant. She said it meant the wind was behind you whether you liked it or not. He thought of his own crossing from Galway forty years before, the one he had never told anybody about, and found he had no argument with her.

The cask they opened at Christmas was the best they had ever made. Anselm poured two measures, one for himself and one for the empty stool where she had sat, and left the bung loose so the air could get at the lid. In the morning the painting was still there, but someone had written FTW beneath it in small careful capitals, and the cellar smelled of oak and apples and something sweeter, like a church after a wedding.