Colour traditional tattoo of a woman with a hair bun, red flowers and a blue banner reading Stay True, on an upper arm.

Traditional pin-up portrait with banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold-outlined portrait of a woman with a high hair bun, red flowers and gold beads, with a blue banner across the bottom that reads STAY TRUE. The linework is thick and black, with smooth grey shading in the hair and soft blended tones in the banner. Bright red, green, yellow and blue ink dominate against the pale skin, and the tattoo sits on the upper arm with a white lace top visible beside it.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Portrait Flower Bead Banner Hair bun Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vermilion jar went skating across the cabin floor when the steamer rolled, and Ada Mercer caught it with two fingers before it could reach the scuppers. She swore the way her mother had forbidden, then wiped the lid on her apron. Below deck the stewards were already calling the second sitting, and the blue for the banners had to last until Freetown, so she counted the tubes twice before she let herself sit down.

Keep reading

The sailors came to her cabin one at a time, rolling up their sleeves and asking for their mothers, or for girls from Bootle they had never asked to marry. Ada gave them what the flash sheets had taught her: a thick black line, a high bun pinned with flowers, gold beads looped round the head like a rosary. Cass, a stoker from Wallasey with coal in the creases of his knuckles, wanted a woman in a red blouse and a banner under her. "What does it say?" she asked. He thought about it for a long time. "Stay true. It's what my dad wrote on the back of his last letter."

She was halfway through the lettering when the swell came in from the port side and the brush slid off the B. She had to start the whole word again on a clean strip of paper, her hand steadier than it had any right to be after a bottle of rum and a night of bad weather. Cass watched her in the mirror, not speaking, while the ship groaned and the light came through the porthole in grey stripes.

When he left, she pinned the flash sheet back on the wall beside her bunk. The woman on it had been pinned there for eleven years, under three different ships' names, and every port had given her new flowers. Ada lay awake listening to the engines and thought of the stoker's dad, who had never once been asked what the words meant.