Vintage pin-up woman in corset on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in profile with her hair swept up and a flower pinned in it, looking to the right with one hand resting on her hip. The corset and the sheer skirt beneath it are rendered with fine, layered shading that gives the fabric texture and depth. The design is in black and grey and fills the length of a vertical leg against a dark background.

Realism Calf Woman Pin-up Corset Flower Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Vera had her hand on her hip before the vicar finished the second hymn, which was how I knew the bride's brother would be dancing with her by nine. I had laced her into the corset myself that morning in the back room above the Regent, forty-two hooks, and she had complained about every one. The white ranunculus pinned in her hair was one I'd pinched from the church porch on the way in.

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The reception was in the Co-op hall, with trestles covered in brown paper and a three-piece band that had learned two tunes between them. Vera wore the net skirt she'd dyed the colour of weak tea so it wouldn't show the darns, and she turned her face away from the room whenever someone tried to catch her eye, the way she did when she was deciding whether to forgive them. A strand of hair had come loose at one side. I didn't fix it.

Near eleven, Stanley Pike, the bandleader, asked me to take a photograph on his camera, and I agreed on condition he never asked Vera to smile. When I looked through the viewfinder she was already gone, out through the side door into the car park where the cold came off the tarmac. I got one picture: her shoulder, the ribs of the corset catching the light, the skirt trailing behind her like smoke.

The next morning Stanley brought the print round to the shop and asked where she'd gone. I told him she'd gone where she always went, which was anywhere the music stopped being polite. I pinned the photograph above the sewing machine, where it still hangs, because it is the only picture I own where she looks like she has somewhere else to be.