Two large agate slice tattoos on the lower legs, one in bright orange and teal, the other in dark blue and orange with a dotted outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin agate slice tattoos on lower legs

Calf · Colour · Photo

Two large tattoos sit side by side on the lower legs, each showing a cross-section of an agate or geode slice. The left design is filled with orange, pink, teal and purple, with dense flecked texture and a dotted outline, while the right is mostly deep blue and black with orange bands and a fine dotted edge. The soft, painterly colour blending gives both pieces a watercolour look against plain skin and a paved ground.

Calf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in close, the rain's found the gap in the awning again and there's no shifting it till the cobbles finish drinking. You want to hear how a stone gets broken in two and still keeps its promise? My grandfather told me this at this very trestle, and he had it from a woman who cut stone for the canal boats before the war.

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Her name was Maud Ferrier, and she worked a diamond saw in a shed behind the lock keeper's cottage. One February she split a dull grey nodule and out fell a geode the size of a loaf, hollow and banded like the inside of a tree turned to glass. Rust rings, a lace of blue, a black seam where water once stood still for a thousand years. She cut it clean down the middle, and the two halves sat on her bench facing each other across the sawdust like a pair of eyes told not to blink.

Her sister Nell wanted the half that glowed orange, so Maud kept the dark one and said she was being generous. They never spoke of it again. Maud polished her half until it held the lamplight like a pond at dusk, and she carried it in her apron pocket for forty years, taking it out at the stall to show anyone who would stop.

Nell sold hers at a fair in Kendal the week before Maud died. When the old woman's things were sorted, the man from the estate found a pencil sketch tucked in the lid of her tin, two ovals with dotted edges, and a note in her round hand: match them when we're both done. Mind the wet, lad, and hold it by the rind.