Two photos of a traditional style neck tattoo showing a red jewel set inside an ornate heart frame beside a black and grey rose on the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red gem heart and rose on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Mixed · Photo

The photographs show a neck tattoo with an ornate heart frame containing a red faceted gem, placed beside a large black and grey rose. Bold outlines and shaded petals give the rose depth, while the frame has beaded detailing and scrolled flourishes below. The top image shows the front of the neck and the lower image shows the back, with the red gem as the main point of colour against the grey tones.

Traditional Neck Heart Gem Jewel Rose Ornament Scrollwork

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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she's been sleeping on the good scales since Tuesday. You want to know about the ring? Everybody wants to know about the ring. Forty years I've had that red stone in the cabinet under the till, and not one of them ever asked me what it was cut from before they asked what it cost.

Keep reading

It came in on a wet night in February, wrapped in a handkerchief that had once been somebody's Sunday best. A young man called Ferris Tulley brought it to me, and he didn't want money, he wanted a loan against a promise. His mother's brooch, he said. Heart-shaped, with a silver filigree frame like lace left out in the rain, and a garnet at the centre that caught my lamp and threw it back red as a dropped match. He'd pawned it once already, and he was back to buy it out, and he hadn't the sixpence for the interest. I told him to fetch the rest of the story, because I have never lent on a stone without the story attached.

He came back the next week with a rose. Not a flower, mind, a rose he'd had drawn on the skin beneath his collar, black and grey, petals curled like they were trying to shut out the cold. He said his mother had sewn that rose onto every coat he ever wore, and he'd decided he'd carry it himself now. I looked at that brooch for a long while, then I wrote him a ticket for the full amount and let him keep it. Some debts are paid in the wrong currency, and that's no business of mine.

So here it sits. The stone's not for sale, and never was. Ferris comes in on Thursdays to look at it through the glass, and I let him, because a thing that's been mended twice is worth more than one that's never been broken.