Grid of eight illustrated princess portraits in neo-traditional tattoo flash style, each in an oval cameo frame with rose and banner details.

Eight princess portraits in tattoo flash style

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A grid of eight illustrated flash designs, each showing a princess character bust-length inside an oval cameo frame. Roses, leaves and small birds surround the portraits, and each design has a ribbon banner with lettering below. The bold outlines, shading and warm, saturated colours sit on a parchment-toned background, with a mix of tattoo-style ornament throughout.

Neo-trad Traditional Botanical Princess Rose Banner Mermaid Bird Hummingbird Lotus Leaves Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the moat has teeth tonight, and these stones have heard worse than my voice. Up in the gallery where the roof fell in, eight oval frames hung on the wall, each with a painted woman inside and a ribbon curled beneath her, lettered with a word the old lord's daughters read aloud whenever they wanted courage. Siren. Kiss. Keep on believing. Know your path. My grandmother swore the words were spells, and she was not a woman who lied about spells.

Keep reading

The mermaid went first. The youngest daughter, Marisol, stood on the balcony one wet March and read Siren three times, and the painted girl slid out of her frame with a splash of teal tail and a shower of bright minnows. She sat among the lily pads in the moat and combed her red hair with a silver comb, and every bird that came down to drink carried her messages out to the sea. The others followed one by one, each when her ribbon was read, until the gallery was a row of empty gilt and the roses on the wall had begun to wilt.

On the last night, Marisol read the ribbon about knowing your path, and found the frame beside her own already bare, its ribbon rolled up tight. A hummingbird hung at the broken window, green as a bottle, and it looked at her the way a clerk looks at a debt. Then it flicked away into the dark, and a single red rose dropped onto the sill at her feet.

So if you hear a ribbon being read at dusk, do not answer it. The frames are still hanging up there, and the roses still bloom on the wall. And the old lord's youngest has never once been seen in her own portrait since.