Salome floats in the air, her hair streaming upward, holding a severed head close to her face. A thin stream of blood falls from it into a black pool at lower right, where a single white lily grows, and clusters of black and white circles fill the upper left. The design is printed in black within a ruled border on a large cream sheet. Aubrey Beardsley first drew the scene on his own initiative after Oscar Wilde's play Salome appeared in French in 1893: the moment Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist.

Reproduced in the first issue of The Studio in April 1893, it won him the commission from Wilde and the publisher John Lane to illustrate the English edition of 1894. Because The Studio owned the copyright of that first version, he redrew it for the book, in the more conventional page shape Lane favored. The V&A suggests that the circles at upper left may echo the "clusters of black grapes" to which Salome compares the Baptist's hair. Beardsley's original 1893 drawing of the first version, to which he later added green watercolor washes, is now in Princeton University Library.

This impression was printed from a line block. It is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.