Pencil sketch of an ornate diamond with scrollwork, smoke-like swirls, leaves and a beaded chain, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diamond with scrolls and beaded chain design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on white paper of a faceted diamond outlined with ornate scrolls and swirling smoke-like shapes. Leaves and a dangling chain of beads sit beneath and to the right of the central gem. The linework is clean and black and grey, with light pencil shading on the leaves and beads.

Neo-trad Diamond Scroll Smoke Leaves Bead Chain

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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

The brooch came across my counter on a wet Thursday, wrapped in a handkerchief that still smelled of coal smoke and bay rum. Mr Aldous Penhale wanted four pounds on it and would not look me in the eye while I turned it under the lamp. Forty-one facets, cut by a hand that had clearly been taught by someone impatient, set in a silver mount scrolled like the gates of a church. Along its lower edge a chain of jet beads hung in loops, and between them, pressed in silver, were leaves the shape of ash keys.

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I asked him where it had been. He said it had been his mother's, and then he said it had come off a steamer called the Marigold Vesper, which had burned off the Tyne the winter the chandlers went under. Smoke, he said, was the only thing left of her when they hauled her in. I wrote the name in the ledger, because the ledger is the only honest thing in this shop.

Over the next fortnight I went down to the river and asked the old lightermen. A bosun called Tully remembered the Vesper's cargo: crates of cut stone bound for Antwerp, and one passenger who paid in gold and would not give a name. He had carried a tobacco tin across the gangway himself. Tully's hands shook when he said the tin had never reached the quay.

Mr Penhale came back in March for the brooch. I had not sold it. I set it on the counter between us and asked whether he wanted his four pounds or the rest of the story. He picked the brooch up, turned it once in the lamplight, laid four pounds down in coppers and walked out into the rain without a word. The ledger still says paid. I have never once believed it.