The Pin Up Girl Tattoos

Technically speaking, any full-body depiction of an aesthetically appealing woman qualifies as a ‘pin up’ – thus you could say that the ‘pin up’ as a component of tattoo art has been around a lot longer even than when Western traditional was in its prime! Delicate Geisha girls have been a component image in traditional Japanese tattooing for centuries, the feminine counterparts of the masculine warriors and samurai also present. However, we definitely do have the Ed Hardy, sailor-man era of Western traditional to thank for our conception of the pin up in tattoo art. Pin-ups as we know them in the Western traditional style are all about the old school conception of female beauty, the (arguably!) male ideal of female beauty; they’re all about curves, swells and clothes-bursting bust size – if they’re dressed, that is. Like all of the old school style, it’s all about thick black outlining, strong block colour and eye catching immediacy – a tattoo to catch your eye, about which its’ wearer will have a story. As the historical story goes, sailor men first began to get them for reasons of loyalty to a sweet girl ‘back home,’ a display of loyalty, commemoration and er, confirmed heterosexuality. There’s also tales of a pin-up tattoo done abroad to commemorate an exotic fling. Perhaps some pin-up tattoos could secretly have stood for both simultaneously… Of course, changing times make for changing artwork, and the style and meaning of a pretty girl tattoo has developed, expanded and mutated in a most wonderful way. Nowadays you will see manga-styled, wide-eyed J-pop girls composing the centre of a sleeve tattoo; there are far more cartoonish and far more photo-realistic varieties available as tattoo artists develop and carve their different styles towards what they enjoy and what they can do best. There’s been a trend for photorealistic renditions of the most famous twenties and thirties pin-ups; women are getting pin-ups inked onto their own arms in a beautifully ironic post-feminist gesture. David Beckham sports a pin-up photorealistic tattoo of his wife on his upper arm. Modern day porn stars will invariably have a hardcore fan or two who has their likeness etched. The pin up has morphed from simple icon into a complex, variable and ever-fascinating piece of imagery in the vast catalogue of tattoo symbolism, acquiring and shedding meaning almost on a person-by-person basis. In our opinion, anything that pays tribute to the female form is absolutely brilliant – but just be sure you’ve got what is absolutely the right design for you, and a brilliant tattoo artists to do it for you, before you dip your toe in the water. There’s a fine line, and there’s not much worse than a bad pin-up tattoo…