Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a nautilus shell spiral surrounded by a swirl of dots, on the forearm.

Nautilus shell spiral on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A nautilus shell is drawn in fine engraved-style lines at the centre of a large spiral, with the chambers shaded in black and grey. The surrounding swirl is made of stippled dots and small clusters that fade outwards across the skin. The forearm fills the frame against a dark background, and the design is centred and well lit.

Dotwork Forearm Shell Spiral Galaxy Dot Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart-maker's daughter had counted the chambers of the nautilus so often she could recite them in the dark. Forty-two, each walled off behind her as the animal grew, the pearly partitions sealed like rooms in a house nobody lives in any more. Her father kept one on the windowsill of the shop in Halfmoon Lane, beside the brass dividers and a bottle of ink gone thick as treacle. He said it was the only honest map in Penhallow, because it kept a record of every place it had been.

Keep reading

The summer her father's eyes clouded, the harbour master came asking for a chart of the sandbanks. Every sheet she drew came out wrong, the lines bending back on themselves, the depths crowding toward the middle like a held breath. "The water doesn't run straight here," she told him. She spent three nights at the table with the shell in one hand and a pen in the other, turning it until the whorl matched the sweep of the tide round the Gannet Rocks.

On the fourth night the lamp guttered and she saw it. The sandbanks were not fixed. They walked, year on year, pulled round the same slow spiral as the shell, and every wreck on the coast lay at a chamber's edge. She dotted the sheet with salt from the jar, as her father had shown her to mark soundings, and the dots kept spreading outward until the paper looked like the sky above the lighthouse, a field of small lights, each one somebody's ship.

In the morning she sent the chart to the harbour master with a single note: keep the boats inside the outermost ring. Her father, from his chair by the window, asked if she had finally drawn the honest map. She said she had, and that it was only honest about where the sea had been, not where it was going. He nodded and turned the shell toward the light.