Pencil sketch of a tattoo design in neo-traditional style showing a woman with tear-streaked cheeks, surrounded by roses, a cameo, a bat wing and a spider.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with roses and bat wings sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a woman's face with tears on her cheeks, framed by her hair, pearl strands and a cameo brooch. Roses fill the lower and side areas, with a bat wing and a spider at the top, a key at the bottom and a small jewelled pendant on one side. The linework is shaded in graphite greys with soft hatching, and the composition is symmetrical and vertical.

Neo-trad Woman Face Rose Cameo Bat Spider Pearl Key Tear Hair Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the Hob and Lantern road by four o'clock, and by six the only guest left in the coaching room was the woman in grey who had paid for three nights in advance and asked for the key to number nine. I gave it to her. The brass was cold and the tag said nine in faded ink. She turned it over twice before she hung it on the chain at her throat, beside a cameo of a lady in profile that she never took off.

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Nobody had slept in number nine since my mother ran the house. Dust lay thick on the sill, and the bats that lived in the eaves had taken to hanging from the beam above the bed like coats on pegs. Ruth, who scrubs our stairs on Tuesdays, said the room had been let to a Mrs Calloway in the winter of the big frost, and that she had gone up one night and never come down. Ruth says a lot of things. I stopped listening around the time she started counting the spiders.

At midnight the woman knocked on the kitchen door with the key in one hand and a dark red rose in the other, most of its petals already gone. She asked me to come up. On the bed lay a hairbrush and a letter with its wax seal broken. The hand was fine and slanting: she was sorry, she had never meant to leave him waiting, and she would meet him at the crossroads when the thaw came. The woman in grey stood at the window with her hands clasped, and tears ran down her face without a sound.

I read it twice and folded it back into its envelope. 'He won't come now,' I said. She smiled, the saddest smile I had seen in that house, and opened her palm to show me a small iron key I had not known she was holding. By morning the snow had stopped and the road was clear. Number nine was empty, and the roses on the sill had opened overnight, bright against the grey light.