Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a diamond framed by ornate lotus-style motifs, sitting on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diamond and ornament on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large diamond sits at the centre of the design, outlined with fine lines and shaded with stippled dots across its facets. Ornamental lotus-like motifs with scrolling details rise above and below it, forming a symmetrical column down the forearm. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in neutral light, with only black ink and grey shading visible.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Diamond Lotus Ornament Floral Gem

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are counting the takings again, though there is nothing left to count. The biscuit tin under the caravan step holds four pounds, a bent florin and a pawn ticket for the centre pole. Outside the winter quarters near Ashford, Mr Vance is teaching the last elephant to kneel for carrots nobody can afford, and the rain has got into the drums.

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The diamond lives in the ringmaster's velvet box. It is glass, cut in Birmingham in 1922 for a rival show that folded before its first matinee, and it has outlasted every act that ever wore it. Your grandmother pressed the lotus scrolls around it from brass leaf that once lit the fire-dancers' sleeves. Nobody in the company remembers how to strike the flame that made those petals glow, so the box stays shut and the brass goes green in the damp.

On the last night before the sale, the insurance man comes up the caravan steps with his hat in his hands. You open the box and let him see it. He holds it to the lamp, and the facets throw small grey dots across the wall, the way the dancers once spattered light over the sawdust for the back rows to gasp at. He tells you it is worth nothing much.

You say that is what you told the lions, and you hand him the tin as well, because the figure in it is all the circus has left to sell.