Colour tattoo of a faceted blue and pink crystal with black outlines, sitting on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and pink crystal on the side of the body

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large faceted crystal fills the frame, built from angular panels in turquoise, pale blue, pink and purple. Black outlines separate each facet, and soft gradients move from deep violet at the base to lighter pink near the top. The tattoo is centred on smooth, lightly freckled skin with a dark background at the top left.

Neo-trad Ribs Crystal Gemstone Facet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Three days into the crossing you find out what is in the crate under the bunk. Mavis lifts the lid with the flat of her boot and says it is not coal or scrap but your uncle's crystal, wrapped in oilcloth and bound with cord. It has to reach Shrewsbury by Friday, she says, and not a day after, and you are not to take it out of its wrapping on the water. You promise, and then you do it anyway, once the boat is nosing through the Wenn at dusk and the towpath has gone blue.

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Each face of the stone is a different weather. Turquoise where the water seems to show through, pale blue where the lamp catches an edge, pink in the seams like a bruise going soft at the margins, and at the base a violet so deep you could lose yourself looking. A cutter in Ludlow, Mavis told you, spent eleven years on the planes of it. You count the panels and lose your count somewhere past forty, the way you lose the count of locks on a long day.

At Hallow Weir the keeper climbs down with his lantern and asks what you are carrying. Stone, you say. He wants to know what kind, and you do not have the word, so you lift the crystal into his light instead. He goes quiet and offers you twenty pounds for it, then forty, then tells you to keep your money and your mouth shut at the next lock. You tell him it is not yours to sell.

Back on open water you put the lamp out and let the night take the cabin. Then you set the crystal on the table and watch the violet climb the wall first, pink following it, blue arriving last, until the whole stone is throwing the river back up onto the ceiling in pieces.