Hand-drawn design of an oval gemstone shaded pink and violet with white highlights, set within a grey and black hatched scalloped border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink and blue gemstone in a hatched scalloped frame

Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a single oval, cabochon-style gemstone with a glossy surface and small white highlights. The stone is shaded with pink and violet ink that blends from deep blue at the top to bright pink at the centre. It sits inside a scalloped frame drawn with black hatched linework and soft grey shading on a plain pale background.

Gemstone Hatching

Find an artist for this

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 stone came through the Harwick crossing in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a chamois that smelled of engine oil. Nobody had declared it. I held it under the desk lamp and the violet at the top of it looked like evening settling over the car park, going pink as it sank toward the middle, the way a sky does when it has decided to be kind about the day.

Keep reading

Its carrier was a lorry driver called Dennis Pell, who kept saying it was his mother's and not worth the duty. I didn't ask what it was worth to him. I asked him to show me the back, and he turned it over, and there was a small pitted flaw where the cutter had given up. He laughed at himself. Thirty-one years on the Continental run, he said, and the only thing he had ever carried for love was a lump of glass.

I should have written it up as personal effects and waved him through. Instead I sat with it a while longer. My own grandmother had a ring in a frame like that, scalloped and hatched in pen, and I had never once thought of it as anything but a bit of old silver. Dennis watched me think. Then I stamped the receipt valued nil and gave the tin back to him.

A letter came from Harwick the following spring. Inside was a sketch on the back of a ferry timetable, his mother's ring drawn from memory, every hatched petal of the frame counted out in pencil. He wanted a witness to the drawing, he wrote, because he had decided to have it put on his arm where he could see it from the wheel. The stone was still in his pocket, he said, going pink at the centre whenever he held it to the light.