Grid of ten colour illustrations of Disney-style princesses in traditional tattoo flash frames with rose borders and ribbon banners, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Ten princess portraits in traditional tattoo frames

Traditional · Colour · Flash

This image is a grid of ten illustrated flash designs, each showing a cartoon princess character in an oval frame with roses, ribbon banners and small decorative details on a parchment-toned background. The linework is bold and outlined, with smooth cel-style shading and saturated colour in the figures, flowers and banners. Each panel is arranged in a consistent layout, with the character's face and upper body at the centre and a lettered ribbon along the lower edge.

Traditional Neo-trad Princess Alice Rose Banner Flower Rabbit Mushroom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had been sent to the edge of the wood with a satchel of damp parchment and a message for the old inker, and she was already late when the path forked around the hollow oak. Her mother's flash sheets lay stacked under oilcloth in the cart, ten of them, each showing a girl's face framed in roses above a ribbon that said something different. Mrs Crane had paid for them in eggs. Tamsin did not trust the ribbons. They curled too neatly, as if they knew they were being read.

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A rabbit sat in the middle of the path, white as a folded napkin, watching her with the patience of something that had waited a long time. It wore a small green waistcoat. Tamsin told herself she was tired. The rabbit turned and slipped into the ferns, and where it had sat a ring of brown mushrooms had sprung up since she last passed, with a pinch of blue glitter lying in the middle. She followed, because the sheets in her cart had begun to flutter, though there was no wind.

In the clearing a fairy no taller than a candle stood on a stump and looked at her as though she owed rent. Her wings were fine as moth dust. She held out one hand, and on the palm lay a wet scrap torn cleanly from the corner of a sheet. "You are short one ribbon," the fairy said. "Somebody always is." Tamsin looked back at the cart. Its sheets had gone blank and pale, and the girls had stepped out of their frames to wander among the roses.

The old inker kept one lamp lit for her, as she always did. She smoothed the blank sheet on the bench and set a needle beside it. "Every one of them wants her own words," she said. "Give her the wrong ones and she'll be back in the wood by Michaelmas." Tamsin picked up the pen and wrote the first line that came to her. Outside, the fairy laughed, and the ribbon on the sheet turned gold at both ends.