TENNIS POSTER

As a 17-year-old girl during the long hot summer of 1976 Fiona Walker, then Butler, cheerfully allowed her boyfriend, Martin Elliott, to photograph her knickerless, walking towards a tennis net. Elliott sold the image to Athena, and up it speedily went on the bedroom walls of boys everywhere, becoming one of the world's biggest selling posters.

Now, the Athena Tennis Girl poster is to be included in what organisers say is the first exhibition exploring lawn tennis as a subject in fine art.

Walker was not then, nor ever has been, a tennis player. "I don't have the hand eye co-ordination," she says. Nor has she made a penny from the poster. "I was very naive and was paid nothing."

But she has fond memories of the photoshoot – in which she wore her dad's plimsolls – and harbours no embarrassment at the image. "It never ceases to make me smile when I see it, and I do sometimes see it in some very strange places. I've no regrets about it," she says.

Elliott – who did do very well out of the image – died last year.

Walker was reunited with the picture when she attended the launch of the exhibition, called Court on Canvas.The show is being held this summer at Birmingham's Barber Institute of Fine Arts, less than half a mile from Ampton Road, Edgbaston, where the sport was played for the first time.

• Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art is at the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham from 27 May to 18 September