Traditional style tattoo of a blue shaded diamond on a forearm, surrounded by bold red, green and grey flash-style motifs.

Blue diamond in a traditional sleeve on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A faceted diamond with black outlines and blue shading sits at the centre of the frame, with small radiating tick marks around it. It is surrounded by other bold traditional motifs in red, green, yellow and grey, including a gear, a bird-like shape and a scroll. The bold black outlines and flat colour fills give the piece a classic American traditional look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

It came over the counter in a bread bag tied with fishing line, and the man who brought it would not sit down. Nell Harrower had kept the pawnshop on Gull Steps for thirty-one years and knew the difference between a man selling and a man running. He wanted eleven pounds for it. She told him a stone that clear was either glass or trouble, and he laughed and said it was probably both, then walked out before she could ask where it had come from.

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She held it to the window. The light broke off its facets in small blue ticks across the lino, the way the sun had once come through the gap in the chapel roof when she was a girl. Upstairs, old Abel was winding the clocks he'd taken in pledge and never reclaimed, and the gear of his big regulator turned slow enough that she could hear each tooth catch. A gull had been sitting on the sill outside all morning, pale-eyed and patient, watching the stone the way gulls watch a chip paper.

Abel came down with his loupe still in his eye and turned the diamond over without a word. Paste, he said at last. Then he frowned and turned it again. Paste doesn't get its bevels cut true. Whoever made this had a steady hand and a reason to be careful. He thought it had come off a ship. Two winters back the Mary Ellen went onto the Ness in fog, and the sea had been giving up her cargo ever since, a little at a time, to whoever happened to be walking the tideline at low water.

Nell put the diamond in the window with the other pledges, between a cracked barometer and a christening cup nobody had come back for. She wrote a card in her careful hand and propped it against the glass: not for sale. The gull stayed on the sill until the tide turned, watching the blue catch the sun and throw it back onto the water.

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