Pin-up Girl Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a pin-up tattoo means

A pin-up is a type rather than a person: a woman drawn at the moment she knows she is being looked at, with a wink, a raised heel or a hem caught by the wind. The word turns up in the early 1940s, when servicemen pinned magazine pages and calendar girls above their bunks, and to them the picture stood for the life waiting at home. Sailors carried the same figure onto their forearms, where she worked less as a portrait than as a charm, a reminder of what the voyage was for.

The reading has turned round since. Many of the people asking for one now are women from the rockabilly and vintage scenes, for whom victory rolls, red lips and polka dots are everyday dress rather than fancy dress, and the tattoo is that wardrobe drawn once and kept. Worn that way she means confidence: a body shown on its own terms, by someone who chose the look for herself.

The outfit carries the rest, which is why the designs here differ by job as much as by pose. The sailor girl saluting in a middy blouse and the girl sitting on an anchor belong to the navy flash the motif grew from. The nurse with her oversized syringe, the mechanic in oil-smudged coveralls and the aviator waving from the wing of a propeller plane recall the work women took on during the war. The devil girl with horns in her victory rolls and the haloed angel on her cloud are temptation and innocence, a pair that splits naturally across two arms.

The cropped pieces keep the attitude and drop the body. A head in a tilted sailor cap, two victory rolls with a rose tucked between them, or only a winking eye above red lips reads as the same era at a fraction of the size.

Where the design comes from

George Petty's airbrushed girls ran in Esquire from its first issue in 1933, and in 1940 the magazine brought in Alberto Vargas, a painter from Arequipa in Peru, and sold his work as the Varga Girl. Gil Elvgren painted calendar girls for Brown & Bigelow from 1945, and his favourite gag, a woman surprised by a gust of wind, is the blackwork girl clutching her hat here. Bomber crews copied the paintings onto their aircraft; the B-17 Memphis Belle carried a Petty Girl on the telephone. Tattooers drew from the same well, Norman Collins among them in Honolulu, and when the Navy barred recruits with nude women tattooed on them, shops did a brisk wartime trade in inking clothes onto old ones.

Choosing yours

• Size the piece for the face, not the body. A standing figure 10 cm tall leaves a head barely a centimetre high, too small for the lashes and beauty mark, so the full figures here want 12 to 18 cm; in a small space choose a head, like the dotwork profile in her snood, which holds at 6 or 7 cm.
• Let the hair set the decade. Victory rolls, a snood and a knotted headscarf are the 1940s; cat-eye sunglasses and the carhop on roller skates lean into the 1950s. None of the faces here is a real model, so the period comes from styling rather than from a likeness of Betty Grable or Bettie Page.
• Decide her skin colour on purpose: flat-colour flash often leaves it as bare skin inside the outline, taking the wearer's own tone, where a pale flesh ink does not.

Common questions