Black and grey filigree scrollwork with a faceted purple and blue heart gem, tattooed across the centre of the chest.

Ornate scrollwork and gem heart on the chest

Realism · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A torso photograph showing a symmetrical ornamental tattoo of black and grey scrollwork, with acanthus-style curls spreading left and right and a central element. The focal point is a faceted heart-shaped gem shaded in violet and blue, with a small pink highlight above it. The shading is smooth and the composition is centred on the sternum.

Realism Chest Scrollwork Filigree Ornament Heart Gem Diamond Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Master Ashdown has gone to Birmingham with the good scales, so the workshop is mine until Thursday, and I have been told not to touch the violet stone. I have touched it anyway. Mr Pell brought it in on Monday wrapped in a handkerchief, and when I unfolded the linen the light came off it the way it does off a pond at evening, blue at the edge and purple at the heart. He wants it set in a crest with scrolls either side, like the pediment of a church door, and he wants it finished before the Sunday ringing.

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I have drawn the scrolls three times. The first were too fat, like cabbage leaves, and Master Ashdown would have had them in the crucible. The second were too thin and looked like wire. The third I drew at two in the morning by the gas lamp, with the acanthus leaves turning back on themselves the way the old carvers did at Lincoln, and when I held the sheet to the window they balanced like a pair of gates. I cut the silver to match. Each curl took most of a night with the graver, and my back has not forgiven me.

On Saturday the stone was ready to seat. I measured the gallery with a hair and the hair would not sit square, so I filed the setting again and again until my thumb bled onto the wax. When at last I pressed the heart down it sat as if it had always been waiting there, and the pale flaw above it, which I had feared, caught the lamp like a drop of wine. Mr Pell did not come for it. The boy from the post said he had died on the Friday, quietly, in his chair.

I have put the crest in the drawer under the bench, where Master Ashdown keeps the things nobody has paid for. Tell me, when you come home, whether it should be sold or melted down. I find I cannot decide, and so I sit with it at night, the scrolls turned toward the window like a pair of open hands.