Cameo portrait with roses and butterflies

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil-style drawing of an ornate oval cameo frame enclosing a woman in profile with an upswept hairstyle and a beaded necklace, holding a rose near her chest. Scrollwork, flowers, a moth or butterfly at the base and small petals and butterflies scattered around the edges frame the portrait. The linework is fine and shaded in grey, with a faint lilac wash behind the cameo and a pale background.

Neo-trad Cameo Woman Portrait Rose Butterfly Moth Flower Scrollwork Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo had the shell clamped in the vice before I had even lit the second gas jet, and he would not let me touch it until the grey light came up over the Vyse Street roofs. "A cameo is a lie told in reverse," he said, tapping the pale conch with his file. "You cut away everything that is not her, and what remains must look as if it had always been there."

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The commission came from a widow in Ladywood who wanted her late husband's profile carved for a brooch, but he had died before any sitter could be arranged, so she sent a painted miniature instead. I worked from that for three nights. I gave the lady a high knot of hair, a string of seed pearls at her throat, and a rose held close, as if she were about to say something she had not yet decided to say. The frame I left to Mr Okonedo, who loved scrollwork more than sense and would have hung ivy over a gravestone if the client allowed it.

On the fourth morning the shell split along a vein, right through the brow. I was sick with it. Mr Okonedo turned the stone to the window, looked a long while, and then laughed. "Leave the crack. Carve the moth to sit over it. Nobody buys a cameo for its perfection, child. They buy it because it has survived something."

We sent the brooch off by the eleven o'clock post with the moth hiding the fracture, and the widow wrote back one line: she had thought, at first, it was an accident, and then she understood it was the most faithful thing in the box.