Neo-traditional tattoo of a purple faceted heart-shaped gem with a gold outline and white dots, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple heart gemstone on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A heart-shaped gemstone is tattooed on the inner forearm, with a large dark purple faceted centre surrounded by lighter purple facets. A thick yellow-gold outline and a border of small white dots frame the heart. A partial dark tattoo is visible at the top left edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Forearm Heart Gemstone Gem Jewel Diamond

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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

Mind the loose stone at the door, that's where the storm took Donal's boots, and you'll not be getting them back either. Now sit. You want the story of the heart, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the fire going and the wind doing its usual.

Keep reading

Three winters back, when the fishing was thin, a travelling jeweller came off the ferry with a case of paste stones and a cough. He wanted a bed and a bowl of broth, and he gave Mairi Sinclair the one thing he had of worth, a heart of purple glass cut so clean it caught the lamp and threw it back in pieces across the wall. Mairi said it was amethyst. Her mother said glass. The jeweller only laughed and said a stone is whatever the person looking at it is willing to believe.

Mairi kept it in a tin on the windowsill, and every evening she turned it so the light went through the dark centre like a wee night sky. The boats came home, one by one, and the island went on, the way it does. When the jeweller died in the spring, they buried him above the high tide line with the tin in his coat, because that was what he asked for, and nobody argued with a dying man on Skerrin.

So if you go walking on the north shore and see the gorse blooming purple in June, don't pick it for luck. Just think on the glass heart and the man who sold it for a bed. Now, the kettle's boiling, and I'm owed a biscuit for all that talking.