Atkinson's few extant pictures seem freighted with more meaning than her mute biography can explain. There are several quite strange pictures of her by her teacher Byam Shaw. In one, The Caged Bird (1907), Atkinson is a trapped governess freeing a bird from a cage. In another, The New Voice (1909), she is naked from the waist up, sitting with the god Pan but harking to John the Baptist, and in The Regatta (1910) she wears a flimsy, clinging dress as she punts a boat down a river. These images of her are intimate, sympathetic and admiring. In Rex Vicat Cole's 1932 biography of Shaw there is a description of her: 'a beautiful sitter, one of his students … Her natural charm, added to a gift for understanding what was in the artist's mind, as well as an admiration for his work, and sympathetic help, made her a valued friend and an ideal sitter', which reads now like a 1930s way of saying they were lovers; at least there seems to have been quite a lot going on between them.

It is a mystery picture, to which we have given the title Waiting, for we cannot find its original title. It seems not to have been exhibited, and may only have been painted for private consumption, since it reportedly stayed in the Byam Shaw family. The girl is wearing a showy gown, dressed up with nowhere to go, waiting for someone. Kneeling on a cushion, she has been looking out of the window for some time, kept company by her sleeping cat. The balcony rail and the bars of the window seem to cage her in. The shop with the lit window is a picture dealer's, representing a profession perhaps denied to her because of her sex, and the families in the busy street seem part of a life she cannot share. The silhouetted stone angels perched on the church gable are silent witnesses. Freighted with meaning, it seems that this picture is a self-portrait.