Colour realism tattoo of a red rose above a blue faceted gemstone in a silver filigree setting, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic rose above a blue gemstone on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red rose with soft pink highlights and a green leaf sits above a faceted blue gemstone set in a silver lace-like frame. The rose is shaded smoothly with realistic tonal gradients, while the gem uses sharp facets and bright teal reflections. Teal wash shapes fill the background behind the design, and the photo shows the forearm from two angles.

Realism Forearm Rose Gemstone Heart Filigree Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ondine Varley brought the sapphire in a tobacco tin, wrapped in a lace handkerchief gone yellow at the hem, and set it on my counter as though it might bite. "It was my mother's," she said. "It's a heart, you see. The frame is silver, Dutch I should think. The rose is for the stones she wanted to be rid of." I had no idea what she meant, and I said so, and she laughed the way people laugh at funerals.

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I weighed it on the brass scale in the back room while the kettle went cold. Heart-cut, eleven carats, a stone so dark it looked black until the lamp got under it, and then it turned teal at the edges like the sea off Mumbles in March. Someone had cut its facets sharp enough to draw blood from a thumb. The lace of the setting had been worked by hand, every point lifted with a tool no bigger than a darning needle. I offered forty pounds. She said her mother would have wanted two hundred, and that she would take a pressed red rose pinned to the ticket instead, which I did not have, so she took the forty.

The following Tuesday a sketch came through the door on the back of a chip-shop napkin: a red rose with its leaves inked in green biro, and above it a heart in blue crayon edged with a fussy lace border. The hand that drew it had never seen the stone, yet it had copied every facet, and the teal wash it had dabbed behind the whole thing was the exact colour of the sea off Mumbles in March.

I pinned the napkin beside the ledger, where the old tickets hang, and wrote beneath it in pencil: unclaimed, as yet.