Red pencil tattoo design of a woman's face framed by a rose, leaves and vines, with a hand over her head, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's face with roses and a hand

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A red pencil drawing of a woman's face in profile, partly covered by a large rose and a hand rising from the vines. The linework is fine and shaded with hatching, and the design is drawn in a single red tone on pale paper. Leaves and thin stems wind around the edges, and a red pencil lies at the left of the composition.

Neo-trad Botanical Woman Face Rose Hand Leaves Vine Eye

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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

Mr Okafor said the red pencil was for rough work only, so I kept it behind my ear and drew the roses in it anyway, because graphite made the petals look like weather and red made them look like they might bleed. By the third week of October the Pryce seed plate was a thicket of stems, and I had stopped pretending the hand belonged to the drawing. It came up through the vines on the left, pale at the knuckles, and I hatched its fingers the way you'd hatch a shadow in a cellar.

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It kept moving. Each morning a petal I'd finished had lifted a fraction, or the shading under an eyelid had gone a shade darker overnight. Mr Okafor said I was overworked and should take the Saturday off. Mrs Vance in the packing room said the vines grew in the dark, which was nonsense, since paper doesn't grow, but she crossed herself when she said it, so I didn't argue.

On the Monday I came in early with a kneaded rubber and tried to take the hand out. The eraser left a pink ghost where the fingers had been, and when the ghost faded the hand was back, holding the red pencil itself and drawing very carefully in the margin, cross-hatching a small neat rectangle where my initials should have gone.

I didn't rub it out again. I signed the plate under the rectangle, which was the only blank space left, and sent it to the printers in Leeds with the hand still on it. The catalogue went out in November, and I have since seen a copy in a dentist's waiting room with the cover torn off. The hand was still there, turning the pages.