Colour geometric tattoo of a spiral shell overlapped by blue, green, yellow and purple triangles, placed on the upper arm.

Geometric shell and triangles on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a spiral shell, similar to a nautilus, drawn with thin black linework and overlapping flat triangles in blue, green, yellow and purple. The shell's segments are shaded in red, purple and grey, and the triangles are filled with solid colour and a few white highlights. The design sits on the outer upper arm and is arranged as a diagonal composition from the top left to the lower right.

Geometric Upper arm Shell Spiral Triangle Geometric shape Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the candle, because this is a story about a shell and a stubborn old abbot, and both of them went round in circles longer than was decent.

Keep reading

The abbey of Saint Brannoc sat on a salt marsh where the tide came in like a dog that had been kept too long. Brother Osric ground the blues and greens for the scriptorium, and one spring a pilgrim left him a shell the colour of old ivory, coiled tight as a fist. The abbot took it up, turned it to the window, and declared that the shell kept the golden measure. He wanted the lady window in the north aisle drawn after it, every light set in a triangle, every triangle opening on the next, all of it ruled by compass and square.

Osric tried for forty days. Each time he drew the spiral, the last turn fell a finger short of the first, and the triangles would not sit square against it. The abbot threatened him with bread and water, then with the cold flags of the chapter house, then with nothing at all, which frightened Osric most. On the forty-first night he put down the compass, laid the shell on the chapter house floor, and traced it by candlelight, letting his hand wander round the coil the way a boat drifts on the tide.

In the morning the abbot found the floor covered in lines that did not close. Osric sat with his back to the wall, ink to the wrists. "It never ends," he said. "It only turns smaller and bigger at once, and that is why it fits." The abbot knelt, pressed his thumb to the outer curl, and said nothing for a long while. Then he sent for the glazier, and the window was made exactly as Osric drew it. It is still there, though the sea has taken most of the marsh.