Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cameo silhouette in ornate frame

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of a woman's profile with a full hairstyle sits inside an oval cameo frame with a beaded border and scalloped outer edges. The frame has bold black outlines, swirling ornamental details at the top and a curled ribbon-like base, with pale teal and peach accents inside the oval. The tattoo is photographed close up on the side of the torso, with the design filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Ribs Cameo Silhouette Profile Woman Ornate frame Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cameo had been cut for a lady of the Lantern Court the winter the river froze, and by spring my mother had sold the shell to a jeweller in Vesk who did not ask where it came from. I was the one who carved the profile. Nobody else in Maren Cross could take a line so fine that the sitter's eyelash caught the lamp.

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The commission arrived with a drawing and no name. A woman's head turned to the left, hair piled high in the old fashion, and a note in a clerk's hand: keep the nape clean, she will not be seen from behind. I cut the silhouette in onyx, dark as wet slate, and ringed it with a beaded border of seed pearls I set one by one. The scallops I shaped like the lips of a sea shell, because my master said the eye must be led round the frame before it was allowed to rest.

The jeweller returned the piece with a cracked hinge and a second letter. The clerk wanted the carving reversed, the profile turned to face the other way, so the lady in the locket would look at whoever held it. I told the messenger the onyx would split. He said the stone was not the point. I did it anyway, on a Sunday, with the lamp turned low and the pale teal enamel laid into the oval like breath on glass.

Years later I saw the locket open on a table in the Lantern Hall. The face inside had turned toward the door, as if someone had called her name. I never learned who she was. The clerk had written only that she would not be seen from behind, and I have come to think that was the one instruction I followed without knowing it.