By Aoife Brennan-Szymanski
My grandmother wore a locket every day of her life from the age of nineteen until she died at eighty-three. A small gold one, oval, with a photograph inside that she never showed anyone. When I asked her about it as a child she said it was private, which I found both frustrating and deeply romantic. When she died, the locket went to my mother, who keeps it in a box on her dressing table and doesn't wear it because she says it doesn't feel like hers to wear.
I thought about that locket a lot after my grandmother died. About what it meant to carry something close to you — something that held a person, or a moment, or a version of yourself that you wanted to keep. I'd never worn much jewellery. I didn't think of myself as a jewellery person. But I kept thinking about the locket.
The Search
I started looking properly about six months after she passed. I knew what I wanted in the abstract: something substantial enough to feel real, something in silver because gold has never suited my colouring, something with enough space inside for a photograph and possibly an engraving. I didn't want something delicate and easily lost. I wanted something that felt like it could last sixty years.
The Gecko Jewellery Large Sterling Silver Heart Locket kept coming up. Thirty-two millimetres total — genuinely large, not the kind of locket that sounds substantial in the description and arrives looking like something from a Christmas cracker. High-quality sterling silver with a polished finish. Engraving options on the front, back, and inside. The ability to request custom symbols or handwriting, which was the detail that made me stop scrolling.
My grandmother had a particular way of writing her name — a looping, old-fashioned cursive that I'd seen on birthday cards my whole life. I had one of those cards still. I photographed it and sent it with my order, asking if they could engrave her signature on the back.
They could.
You can find it here: Large Sterling Silver Heart Locket Pendant by Gecko Jewellery Retail
When It Arrived
I opened the package at my kitchen table on a Tuesday morning before work. The locket was heavier than I'd expected, which was immediately reassuring — the weight of something made properly. The engraving on the back was her signature, exactly as I'd sent it, rendered in fine lines that caught the light when I tilted it. I sat with it in my hand for a while before I did anything else.
Inside I put a photograph of her from the 1970s — young, laughing at something off-camera, wearing a dress I'd seen in other photographs but never in life. She looks like herself in a way that photographs of older people sometimes don't quite manage. She looks like the person she was before she became my grandmother.
I put it on and went to work. My colleague asked if it was new. I said yes. She said it looked like it had always been mine. I didn't know how to explain that that was exactly the right thing to say, so I just thanked her.
Seven Months Later
I have taken it off perhaps four times since it arrived. Twice to shower when I remembered, once for an MRI, once to clean it — which took about two minutes with a soft cloth and left it looking exactly as it did when it arrived. The silver hasn't tarnished. The engraving is as sharp as the day it was done. The clasp on the chain is secure in a way that means I don't think about it, which is what you want from something you wear every day.
I understand now what my grandmother was doing. Not just keeping a photograph. Keeping a relationship. Keeping a version of someone that exists only in that small silver space, close enough to feel but private enough to be entirely yours.
I hope someone inherits this locket one day and wonders about it the way I wondered about hers.
Who This Is For
Anyone who has lost someone and wants to carry them in a way that feels right rather than performative. Anyone looking for a gift that will genuinely last — not just in quality but in meaning. Anyone who has been thinking about a locket for years and hasn't quite got around to it. The time is now. The piece is this one.
Browse the full range in our Charms & Pendants collection, Jewellery collection, and Apparel & Accessories collection — there's a full range of Gecko Jewellery pieces worth exploring if you're looking for something that means something.
The Large Sterling Silver Heart Locket Pendant by Gecko Jewellery Retail is available now. Buy it for someone you love. Or buy it for yourself, which is the same thing.
Aoife Brennan-Szymanski is a secondary school librarian, occasional baker, and now, apparently, a jewellery person. She lives in Cork, wears the locket every day, and has her grandmother's signature on her skin whenever she needs it.
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