Navy line drawing of a vintage-style woman holding a fringed banner that reads FREE WILL, on a tan background, shown as a tattoo design.

Woman holding a fringed FREE WILL banner

Colour · Flash

A navy line drawing shows a woman with an updo, standing with crossed legs and holding up a semicircular fringed banner that reads FREE WILL in tall, stylised capitals. The linework is even and uniform, with hatched fringe and a dotted border on the banner. The design sits on a plain tan background with no shading, so the composition is centred and self-contained.

Woman Banner Lettering Pin-up

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The banner had been cut from a tablecloth belonging to the Grand Palace in Hull, and Winnie Dunn was still picking threads from the fringe when Mr Orme came through the wings waving the programme like a white flag. The new owners from the cinema company had seen the rehearsal from the back row and wanted the act cut before Saturday. Nobody pays sixpence to read, Orme said, and he was not wrong about that, but Winnie had painted the words herself on a Tuesday evening with the gas turned low, and she was not about to take them down for a man who sat through the matinee with his hat on his knee and never once looked up.

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The orchestra played the opening bars. Winnie stepped out under the pale light with her hair pinned high and the banner held wide at her shoulders, the bullion fringe swinging and settling, swinging and settling, as if it had its own opinions. For a long moment the stalls only coughed and rustled. Then a woman near the front, a schoolteacher by the look of her gloves, moved her lips over the letters. The word went round the house in a low murmur, the way a draught goes through a room, and by the second chorus the gallery had got hold of it and was roaring it back at the rafters.

When the curtain came down, Orme stood in the wings with the call sheet and said nothing for a while. Then he took his pencil from behind his ear and wrote two words in the margin, underlining them twice, before handing the sheet to the stage manager without a word. Winnie folded the banner over her arm, fringe still trembling, and went to find her dressing room before anyone could change their mind.