The women in Painted Idols
Alt, inked, pin-up: what the words mean
7 min read ▪ 30 August 2026
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Alt, inked, pin-up, glamour. Four words for overlapping things, used loosely by nearly everyone, including the people they are used about.
What is an alt model?
Alt is short for alternative, and it describes someone who models outside the conventional commercial look: tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, a subculture style that mainstream advertising was slow to hire. It is a loose word. It describes a look and a scene rather than a job title, and plenty of people it is applied to would not use it about themselves.
- Alt is about a look and a scene. Inked is about tattoos specifically.
- Pin-up is a genre with a history and a set of props. Glamour is the older commercial word for the same territory.
- None of the four is used as a category on this site. Every painting here carries a name instead.
Alt: what it means and where it came from
Alt is short for alternative. It came out of the online modelling communities that grew up in the early 2000s, when a large amount of work moved onto websites and the people doing it no longer had to match what a commercial agency was willing to book.
What it usually points at is visible: tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, a look borrowed from punk, goth, metal or rockabilly. What it points at underneath is a working arrangement. Alt modelling grew on platforms where a model published her own pictures and built her own audience, rather than being cast by somebody else for somebody else’s campaign.
That second half is the part that matters here, and it is the part most definitions leave out.
Inked: a word about tattoos, not about a person
Inked simply means tattooed. It is the narrower of the two words, and the more useful one, because it describes a fact about a picture rather than a claim about somebody’s identity.
A woman with tattoos is not automatically an alt model, and an alt model does not have to have any. The two words overlap heavily and are not the same, which is why people mix them up constantly.
For a painter the distinction is not academic. Ink is a drawing that is already on the skin, made by somebody else, following a body that moves. Painting it is a different problem from painting a person without it, and that problem is the whole subject of the canvases where the ink is the subject.
Pin-up: a genre with a promise in it
Pin-up is the oldest word of the four and the only one that names a genre rather than a person. It comes from pictures literally made to be pinned up: magazine and calendar illustration from the 1930s onwards, painted rather than photographed, and later the same imagery on the noses of wartime aircraft.
The genre has a fixed vocabulary. A prop, a hat, a bit of denim or swimwear, a look straight down the lens, and a wink. Underneath all of it sits a promise: cheerful availability, with nothing at stake and no consequences for anyone.
That promise is the interesting part, because it is exactly the thing a painting can break. Keep the props, remove the wink, and the picture stops being reassuring. Veronika (American Girl) is the clearest case in this series: there is something in that canvas that only exists if you are standing in front of it, and once you have seen it the hat and the denim stop meaning what you assumed they meant.
Glamour: the older word for the same ground
Glamour modelling is the commercial term that dominated before alt existed, and in Britain especially it carried a particular set of associations with newspapers and lads’ magazines. It describes a register: polished, professional, aimed squarely at being looked at, with none of the subculture signalling that alt implies.
The word has aged. Some people still use it as a neutral job description, some use it as a put-down, and it is worth knowing which one you are hearing. It turns up in search terms constantly, which is the only reason it is defined here.
Where the four words overlap, and where they fail
| Word | What it actually describes | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Alt | A look and a scene, and usually a model who publishes her own work | It is a self-description more than a category. Plenty of people it is used about never use it |
| Inked | Tattoos. A fact you can see | Says nothing about the kind of work somebody does |
| Pin-up | A genre with a fixed vocabulary and a promise built in | Now applied to almost any photograph of a woman in swimwear, which empties it |
| Glamour | A commercial register aimed at being looked at | Carries a judgement for a lot of people, and not always the same one |
The common failure is the same in all four cases. They are words for pictures that get used as words for people, and a person is not a genre.
Which of these words fit these paintings
Some of them fit some of the pictures, and that is as far as it goes. What follows describes canvases, not the women in them.
- Inked fits two of them properly. Kayleigh (Tattoos) and Dailey (Illustrated) are the canvases where existing ink is the actual painting problem, and they are the subject of their own article.
- Pin-up fits the vocabulary of a handful. Veronika (American Girl) has the hat and the denim. Dana (Black Bikini) and Dakota (Pink Bikini) are swimwear pictures by title. What none of them has is the wink.
- Alt fits the working arrangement rather than the look. Every subject here published the photograph herself and built her own audience, which is the part of the definition that survives.
- Glamour fits the register of the source images better than it fits any of the paintings, which is roughly the point of painting them.
One canvas refuses all four. Lindsey (White Blouse) is the one without a layer: everything else in the series has something between her and you, and here there is none. That turned out to be far harder to paint than any amount of ink or latex, and there is no genre word for it at all.
Why this studio uses names instead
You will not find any of these four words used as a category on this site. There is no alt collection and no pin-up section, and that is a decision rather than an oversight.
Fourteen women appear across the canvases and each one has a page with her name on it. The reason is not delicacy. It is that a category is a way of talking about somebody without having to know anything, and the entire premise of this series is that these are specific people who made specific pictures on purpose.
The words above are useful for finding your way here. They are not useful for describing what you find. The women in Painted Idols is the index, and it is organised by name.
Those four are labels for the subject. The name for the category itself, and what it does and does not claim, is on what erotic art is.
Questions people ask
What is an alt model?
Alt is short for alternative. It describes someone who models outside the conventional commercial look, usually with tattoos, piercings or a subculture style, and usually publishing her own pictures to her own audience rather than being cast for somebody else's campaign. It is a loose word about a look and a scene, not a job title.
What is the difference between alt and inked?
Inked means tattooed and nothing more. Alt describes a look and a way of working. The two overlap heavily but are not the same: a woman with tattoos is not automatically an alt model, and an alt model does not have to have any.
Is this pin-up art?
Some of the canvases borrow the vocabulary of pin-up, which is a genre of pictures made to be pinned up, with a prop, a look down the lens and a wink. These keep some of the props and drop the wink, which is what makes them something else.
Are these paintings sorted by category?
No. There is no alt collection and no pin-up section here. Fourteen women appear across the canvases and each has a page under her own name, because a category is a way of talking about somebody without knowing anything about them.
