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It's funny you mention her hands...I drew the subject's fraternal twin Janie just before this one, and their mother asked me to tone down the realism
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Don't make too much of any one item I mention. I'm usually just thinking out loud and inviting you to look at something again with me. It may well be that things are exactly the way you want them, and that's fine with me. As for the tapering fingers, I'm sitting here with a catalogue from the Ingres "Image of an Epoch" exhibition. It's hard to find many portraits in the catalogue in which Ingres hasn't tapered the fingers so much that they're generally twice as wide at the knuckle as at the fingertip. His "Madame Moitessier, Seated" (which happens to be used on the dust cover of the catalogue) depicts this tapering in quite extreme degree. If memory serves (I'm no art historian), that was actually a convention during at least one period.
I'm not sure what "toning down the realism" would entail, though perhaps there was a feeling that the hands in that other piece were too detailed or overmodeled, so that too much attention was being drawn to them, or some of the "femininity" was lost through the harshness of such effects. A male subject's hands can have a lot more "realism", such as in the gnarly knuckles, stretched tendons, and prominent veins shown in the piece I posted in the "Introduce Yourself" topic. (And believe it or not, I actually had to "tone down the realism" a bit in these old farm kid's hands just to get that look.)
I think you'll have fun PhotoShop-ing the image. (Be sure to work on a copy, not the original!)
Steven