Pencil and ink drawing of a woman's face framed by roses, peonies, a butterfly and a dragonfly, a neo-traditional tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with roses and butterfly

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a woman's face in three-quarter view, with her hair swept across her forehead. Flowers, a monarch butterfly, a dragonfly, pearl strands and two large roses surround her, with leaves and scrollwork filling the gaps. The work uses fine black linework and grey shading on pale paper, with a pink pen lying across the top right corner.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had drawn the woman's face four times before Edith Pryor agreed it looked like her sister. The first attempt had the eyes too round, the second had lost the parting, and the third had a mouth that Edith said made her look about to ask for money. Nell kept the fourth on the drawing board under the lamp, pinned flat with a pink propelling pencil she had bought from a market stall because the colour made her smile at dawn.

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The roses came easily. Nell had been drawing roses since her father's shop in Hull, shading the petals with the flat of the lead until they looked wet, and she knew how a bloom sat when the wind had got under it. Edith wanted a dragonfly too, and a monarch, because her sister had sailed for Canada in the autumn of 1948 with a monarch painted on the lid of her trunk. Nell set the butterfly high on the brow where the hair fell away, wings open as if it had just landed and thought better of it.

The pearls were the difficult part. Each one had to read as round without the paper seeing it, so Nell worked them in a line down the scrollwork until her wrist ached and the lamp had gone warm against her cheek. When she finished, Edith held the sheet up to the window and said nothing for so long that Nell began to tidy the pencils.

"She'd have liked the hair," Edith said at last. "Nobody ever got her hair right."

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