In the pictorial representations of the narrative of *Layli and Majnun* in Qajar art, the female motif functions not merely as a narrative element, but as an iconographic construct that contributes to the formation of meaning. The origin of this meaning lies in the literary source text, Nizami Ganjavi's *Layli u Majnun*; the pictorial hypotexts are the artists' readings of that same source text. Gérard Genette's theory of transtextuality, by explaining the various levels of relations among texts, provides a theoretical framework for analysing the implicit and explicit connections between works of art, interpreting each work in relation to a network of earlier and contemporaneous texts. The present study examines the female motif in a Qajar tile painting housed in the Golestan Palace, centred on “The Meeting of Layli and Majnun in the Desert.” The aim is to identify the visual characteristics of the female motif in the Qajar tile painting and to investigate how this work derives from literary and pictorial hypotexts within the Iranian artistic tradition. The research questions are as follows: What are the iconographic and corporeal characteristics of the motif of Layli in the Qajar tile painting? How do these characteristics relate to the literary hypotext (Nizami's poem) and to pre-Qajar pictorial hypotexts, and how have they been reconfigured within the medium of tile? How does this reconfiguration, in the absence of written text, enable the viewer to recognise the narrative? This qualitative study adopts a descriptive-analytical method and, drawing on library-based data, analyses the work according to Gérard Genette's theoretical framework, focusing on hypertextuality and intertextuality. The findings indicate that Layli is represented in this tile with full clothing, a contracted body posture, a calm facial expression, and a Qajar aesthetic type, marked by large eyes and joined eyebrows. Some transformations, such as the shift of the face towards the Qajar type and the condensation of the scene, occur in relation to all hypotexts, while others, such as the colour of Layli’s garment and her posture, are specific to each hypotext. It further emerges that only works with a clear date preceding the tile may be treated as its hypotexts; on this basis, contemporaneous works have been excluded. As a result, the motif of Layli becomes an organizing element within the semantic structure of the work; through transformative derivation from hypotexts and the activation of iconographic codes, the narrative is reproduced in a condensed and architectural form. The originality of this study lies in three points: it proposes an operational criterion for selecting hypotexts and identifying intertextual relations in traditional arts; it distinguishes transformations common to all hypotexts from those specific to each; and it shows that the meeting place in Nizami's text is a palm grove rather than a desert, and that the pictorial tradition merged this palm grove with Majnun's desert habitat, a conflation not previously reported in studies of the Golestan Palace tiles.