Diamond Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a diamond tattoo means

The name is the first meaning. It comes through Latin from the Greek adamas, unconquerable, and the stone earns it: diamond is the hardest natural material, the 10 at the top of the scale Friedrich Mohs drew up in 1812. Worn for that, it says someone could not be worn down. The honest version carries a flaw. Hardness resists scratching, not shock, and a diamond struck along its cleavage plane splits cleanly, which is how cutters once opened rough stones.

Pressure is the second. Diamonds crystallise from carbon roughly 150 kilometres below the surface and reach it only through rare volcanic pipes, so the stone is worn for something survived under strain. The popular version, coal squeezed into gems, is wrong: most diamonds formed far deeper than any coal seam, and long before land plants existed to make coal.

Love is the reading advertising built. Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave Mary of Burgundy a diamond ring at their betrothal in 1477, often cited as the first on record, but the stone became the standard engagement ring only in the twentieth century, after the copywriter Frances Gerety wrote A Diamond Is Forever for De Beers in 1947. The plain band with a small stone on this page belongs to that story. So do the crown set with stones and the heart built out of facets, where the gem is an attribute of something else.

Worth is the last, in both senses. The flash diamond with four-pointed sparkles at its edges is about shining and being seen, the same instinct as ice in hip-hop slang. The raw octahedron here is the older phrase, a diamond in the rough: value that is real before anyone has cut it. The melting stone turns the whole idea over, borrowing the soft drip Salvador Dalí gave his watches in 1931 to say that even forever ran out.

Where the design comes from

For most of history diamonds came from India, from the gravels of the Golconda region, thought to have yielded the Koh-i-Noor and the blue stone later cut into the Hope. Brazil took over in the eighteenth century, and after the Eureka diamond was picked up near the Orange River in 1867 South Africa overtook both. The shape tattooists draw is younger than the trade. Early stones were polished octahedra, the point cut, and the modern round brilliant, a flat table over a deep pointed pavilion, took its proportions from Marcel Tolkowsky's Diamond Design of 1919. Buddhism made the stone a picture of wisdom that cuts through illusion, and a Diamond Sutra printed at Dunhuang in 868 is the oldest surviving printed book to carry a date.

Choosing yours

• Pick the cut before the style, since each is its own outline: the round brilliant seen side-on is the symbol everyone reads, the emerald cut from above a rectangle of stepped facets with clipped corners, the pear a teardrop, the marquise a pointed oval, the raw crystal two pyramids base to base. The emerald cut's nested steps close up first and read as a grey block below about 5 cm.
• Brilliance has to be faked. A real stone shines because light bounces inside it; ink can only set dark facets beside light ones, so contrast carries the sparkle. White ink fades soonest, so a highlight left as bare skin lasts longer.
• Symmetry shows every error, so keep a lone stone on a flat field. The rose-crossed stone and the melting one break the mirror on purpose.

Common questions