Neo-traditional tattoo design drawing of Medusa with red and grey snake hair, shown as a pencil and ink sketch on paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa portrait tattoo design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil and ink drawing of a woman's face and shoulders with her hair formed from coiled snakes, in the manner of Medusa. The face is shaded in soft greys with heavy dark eyelids, while the snakes, necklace and draped garment are filled with coral red and black. Bold outlines and a centred, cropped composition suit a tattoo flash design, and pens sit at the edges of the frame.

Neo-trad Snake Woman Portrait Necklace Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Pell had been engraving banknotes for thirty years and had never once been asked to make the paper move. The commission came by carriage from a Liverpool shipping office: a crest for the lodge room, a woman's head at its centre, her hair a nest of serpents. 'Red for the snakes,' the clerk said, tapping the order form. 'Coral, not blood. The directors are particular.'

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Pell worked through the nights with his pens laid out along the bench like surgical instruments, grey wash for the cheekbones, black for the lids that he kept heavy so the eyes would look down rather than out. He had drawn a hundred faces. This one kept turning away from his pencil. Each morning the sketch had the head tipped a degree further toward the window, and each morning he told himself he had been careless with his own hand.

On the ninth night the coral ink ran out mid-curl. He mixed the last of it with a drop of brandy and finished the serpent at the throat, and when he looked up the lamp had burned low and the drawing was looking at him, lids lifted just enough. He did not sleep. In the morning he sent the sheet to Liverpool unsigned, wrapped it in brown paper, and wrote on the cover only: Do not hang it where anyone must look up at it.

The reply came by return post, one line in the clerk's hand. The directors have hung it above the door. Nobody has yet been able to meet its eyes, and they have voted it the finest thing the firm ever commissioned. Pell read it twice, then took a clean pen and began, very carefully, to draw the blinds.