Back view of a person in a black bikini bottoms showing traditional-style tattoos on the thigh and hip, including a helmeted woman head and a bowling pin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional helmeted woman on thigh at the beach

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person in black bikini bottoms is photographed from behind on a beach, with the sea behind them. The tattoos include a large traditional-style woman wearing a horned helmet on the thigh, a bowling pin on the hip, and a peach-like shape and shell motif on the buttock and lower back. The bold outlines and flat fills are in red, yellow, green and skin-toned inks, giving a mixed colour palette.

Traditional Thigh Back Woman Helmet Shell Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, Mr Pellow has finally let me up the back stairs above the Crown, though only because the bowling alley burnt down and he still owes Dad for the pins. You would have hated the smell of the ink and loved the walls. Every inch is flash: swallows, an anchor, and a woman in a horned helmet staring down the room as if she owns the harbour.

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Mr Pellow says a man came off a Liverpool boat in 1931 with one good eye and a crate of peaches he never explained, and he drew her that same week. The peach is still pinned beside her, with a shell curled round it like a cupped hand. He swears the shell is the one you brought back from Madeira, and I have not told him that is impossible, because I want it to be true.

Last Thursday he let me hold the cloth while he did a bowling pin on a fisherman's hip. Three lines and one red stripe, and it was finished in less time than it takes to boil the kettle. The fisherman paid in cod and a promise to bring his own bottle next time. I stood at the window afterwards and thought about you out past the breakwater, and how steady your hands always were.

I have asked Mr Pellow to keep the helmeted lady for me until you are home. When you come back we will climb those stairs together, and you can tell me which of her colours you would choose. I will choose the green, because it is the colour of the sea you keep describing in your letters. Your sister, Jean.