Black and grey tattoo of a scallop shell with a solid black pilgrim silhouette holding a staff, with Camino de Santiago lettering and the year 2013, on a calf.

Camino de Santiago scallop shell on calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A scallop shell fills the centre of the image, with a solid black silhouette of a figure in a hat holding a staff sitting in front of it. The shell's ribs are rendered with soft grey shading, and the words Camino de Santiago curve along the lower edge beneath it, with 2013 above. The tattoo is in black and grey ink on a bare calf, photographed straight on against a plastic-covered surface.

Calf Scallop shell Silhouette Staff Hat Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who keeps the old pilgrim road in your head, the way other people keep recipes. Every late August you walk the rows of Tía Aurora's quince and apple trees at the bottom of the valley, and every August she asks whether you have finally written down the route. You tell her no, and she laughs, because she knows the shells on the gate posts are answer enough.

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This year the wasps are thick over the windfalls and the light goes gold early behind the ridge. Aurora has set a plate of bread and cheese on the wall for whoever comes walking up from the village road. Nobody comes, but she sets it out anyway, the way her mother did when the real pilgrims still passed through with their staffs and their sun-burnt necks. You pick up a fallen scallop-shaped leaf from the path and turn it over. Its ribs fan out like the grooves in the shell you carried for three hundred kilometres in a pocket that never quite closed.

By dusk you have filled two baskets and Aurora has told you, for the third time, that the figure on the old church door looked nothing like a man with a hat, more like a boy who had lost his way. You do not argue. You carry the baskets to the wagon, and when you look back the plate on the wall is empty, though the cat is nowhere near it and the wind is still.