Small purple crystal tattoo with dark outlines and soft violet shading on the inner forearm.

Purple crystal on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small crystal or gemstone shape sits on the inner forearm, drawn with fine dark outlines and facets. The stone is shaded in violet and lilac tones that fade towards the lower edge. The tattoo is centred on pale skin against a dark background and a blue patterned cloth.

Fine line Forearm Crystal Gemstone

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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

Right, sit down where the light from the stairwell can't get at you, because this is a story about a stone, and stones don't like being looked at too hard. You know Flat 41 in Ashdown House, the one with the blue cloth over the balcony rail? That was Mrs Okafor's, though nobody on the eleventh floor called her that. They called her the Lilac Lady, on account of the purple she kept in a biscuit tin.

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Forty years back, her husband Emeka worked the quarries out past Matlock before the council pulled the lift shafts out. He came home one Friday with his coat pocket heavy and a lump of amethyst the size of a hen's egg. It wasn't polished. It had sharp edges like a broken window, and when the kitchen lamp caught it the colour ran from deep violet at the top to pale lilac at the bottom, as if the rest of the light had drained out of it on the way down.

He never gave it to her. He said a stone that had sat in the dark for a million years should not be cut into jewellery for an anniversary. So she kept it in the tin, and every evening she lifted it to the window to watch the block opposite turn gold.

When the flats were condemned, she carried that tin down eleven floors on her own, one step at a time, because the lift had been broken since March. At the bottom a man from the council was waiting with a clipboard. She opened the tin, showed him the stone, and asked what he thought it was worth. He told her nothing. She laughed and said it was the first honest valuation anyone had given her in years, and she walked it home.