Black and grey portrait of a woman with a red circle behind her head, tattooed on the back of a hand, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Female portrait tattoo on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey portrait of a woman with dark hair swept back, a collar and a small mark above the lip is tattooed on the back of a hand. Bold outlines and dotted shading model the face, and a flat red circle sits behind the head. Part of another tattoo, showing a winged design, is visible at the top right of the frame.

Traditional Hand Portrait Woman Face Collar Circle Moth

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one in Harrow Dene who still keeps a lamp lit at the forest edge, because your father did, and because the moths come to it in June like a debt coming due. A paper sun the colour of a robin's breast hangs above the lane where your sister pinned it after the fever. You walk out past the last cottage with the lamp in one hand and a tin of gum arabic in the other, since the woman in the high collar has promised to sit for you at the stile.

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She does not come at dusk. She comes after the church bell has stopped, stepping out of the birches with a face so still it could be a coin. She says she has walked the forest looking for a painter who will not lie about the mouth. You tell her you paint only what the lamp shows you. She laughs once, a dry sound like a page turning, and settles on the stile with her back to the trees.

You work until your fingers ache, stippling dots of ink into the shadow under her cheekbone, using the back of your own hand because you have no board. A moth lands on your wrist, its wings dusted with gold, and she tells you it is the last of the old wardens, and that when it dies the forest will open its gate to the village. You ask how she knows. She lifts one finger toward the dark where the birches end, and there is nothing there but more dark.

At dawn you wake on the stile alone. The lamp is cold. On the back of your left hand is her face, a red sun behind it, the collar sharp as a shoreline. In the village that morning the postmistress asks where you had such a fine likeness done, and you tell her you were lent it, and that the forest keeps what it borrows.