Realism tattoo of grey roses with dark leaves and a red faceted heart on a forearm, shown on two arms side by side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey roses and red gem heart on forearms

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a tattoo of grey roses and dark leaves stacked down the arm. A large red faceted heart, shaded to look like a cut gemstone, sits in the centre of each design. The rose petals are finely shaded in black and grey, and the red heart is the only strong colour against denim shorts and a light background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Rose Heart Gemstone Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone came to me in a twist of tissue paper, wrapped the way my father always wrapped anything he didn't want the post office to lose. Garnet, he said, though it was too clean for garnet, and he had cut it himself on the lap wheel above the shop in Hatton Garden the winter before he got sick. Eleven facets on the crown, he'd written on the card, and a heart shape that took him four days and two cracked blanks to get right.

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I had been running the counter alone since March. The regulars knew me as Mr Okafor's girl, and they were patient with me when I mixed up the carat weights, though Mrs Pyle still brought her brooch in every Thursday to ask whether I had heard anything from the bank about her mortgage. I hadn't. I spent most evenings under the loupe with the shutters half down, working through his ledgers, learning that he had never once in forty years sold a heart without first asking the buyer what they had lost.

The stone sat in the drawer for nine days before I understood what he had meant by the card's last line, which said only: set it where you can see it. So I took it to Ruth on Greville Street, who does work for the lads who come in off the boats with their forearms full of anchors, and I asked her for roses, grey as a November morning, climbing the arm, with the heart sunk into the middle of them like a lamp in a window. She looked at the stone for a long time before she said anything. Then she said it would take two sittings and that I would hate the second one.

I did hate it. But when she wiped the last of the ink away and I looked down at the red catching the light from the shop window, I saw the cut exactly as he had drawn it, every facet throwing a little of the room back at me.