Coloured pencil tattoo design of a face with red spiky hair and a pale disc on the forehead, framed by two dark red roses and hands inside a yellow diamond.

Portrait with roses in a diamond frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a pale face with swept red hair, a pale disc on the forehead and dark lips, with hands held up beside the cheeks. Two dark red roses with teal leaves sit on either side inside a black-outlined diamond with a yellow fill. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with warm red, orange and yellow tones against a plain light background.

Neo-trad Portrait Face Hand Rose Hair Moon Diamond Leaves

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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

Sit down by the stove, you lot, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about the moon that came down the Grand Union and got itself stuck on a girl's forehead. Her hair stood up off her head as if she'd been running into a gale since birth, and it was the colour of rust on a lock gate in August. Nobody on the towpath thought much of her. She sold dark red roses from a bucket at the lock, with leaves the blue-green of the cut at first light.

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One night the moon came off its hook over Braunston and dropped into the lock pound with a noise like a dropped plate. The lock-keeper's dog wouldn't go near it. The girl waded in up to her knees, lifted it out with both hands, and found it cold and light as a tin lid. She pressed it to her brow to stop it rolling off, and it stuck there the way wet paper sticks to glass. She said, very calm, 'Well, that's me sorted for a while.'

She carried it about for a season after that. The boatmen said she never once took her hands from her cheeks, as if she were holding her own face on, and that when she did lift them the roses in her bucket had opened overnight. The lock-keeper's wife swore the moon grew a little each time the girl laughed. Then one wet March the girl walked back into the water at the same lock and turned her face up to the rain, and the moon slid free and went up into the sky like a coin tossed down a well.

So if you've wondered why there's a pale spot on the cut every February, that's your answer. Go on, drink your tea. The moon's still up there, and the girl's still got the roses.