Black and grey pencil drawing of a woman in a cap with script lettering, a hand raised to her mouth and a rosary, a tattoo flash design with no placement on the body.

Pencil portrait of a woman in a script-embroidered cap

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey pencil drawing of a woman wearing a cap with flowing script lettering across the front. Her hand is raised to her mouth, with lettering across the knuckles and a rosary hanging below, and a winged figure appears at the right edge. Soft shading and fine hatching give the portrait a realistic finish, with script text across the chest and lower edge.

Realism Lettering Woman Cap Script Lettering Rosary Wing Hand Tear Portrait

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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

Ottilie had been painting shopfront letters on Dudley Road for thirty years, and she knew the difference between a name that wanted to be seen and one that wanted to be kept quiet. The young man who came in on a wet Thursday wanted the second kind. He set a black cap on the counter, its brim already cracked, and asked whether she could lift a word off the front in silver thread and lay it back down exactly as it had been.

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She worked with a fine sable and a pot of gold size, copying the loops from a tin of old tram tickets she kept for luck. Outside, rain ran down the gutter past the boarded chapel whose bell had not rung since the war. Her mother used to say a loop should never close where it began, or the word would come back looking for you. So Ottilie left the tail of the last capital open, on purpose, and blew on it until the thread caught the lamp.

When he turned the cap over in his hands, he asked what the word meant. She told him it meant whatever the owner needed it to mean, and that the rosary he had left in her dish would cost him a pound to collect. He laughed, said he might have to come back for it, and then didn't. A week later a postcard arrived through the letterbox with one pencilled wing drawn in the corner and no name at all.

She pinned the card above the size pot, beside the rusted bell rope she had rescued from the chapel skip. The window light fell across the open tail of that capital every morning, and every morning she left it exactly as it was.