Blue and black ink drawing of a nautilus shell with waves splashing out of its opening, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nautilus shell with blue waves

Colour · Flash

A line drawing of a nautilus shell, with its chambered spiral visible inside the outer curve. Waves burst out from the shell's opening in loose, feathered strokes, with blue wash and dark outlines throughout. The design is drawn on a cream background and fills most of the frame, with the spray of water spreading toward the upper left.

Shell Wave Water Spiral Splash

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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 lift at Gull Court has been broken since Tuesday, so you carry the shopping up seventeen flights with the bag handles biting into your fingers. By the twelfth landing the stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's vinegar chips, and the sea is already loud through the concrete, the way it is when the wind swings round to the south.

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The nautilus sits on the windowsill where Nana Ivy left it, in the same pale green saucer she used for loose buttons. She brought it back from Weymouth in a biscuit tin the year before she went into the home. Each chamber, she told you, is a room the animal grew and then sealed behind itself as it climbed outwards, and you still count them with your thumb every night before bed. Tonight there is a fine grey mist on the sill, and the shell's mouth is wet.

Mum says it's condensation and tells you to put the tea on. You don't. You slide the window open instead, and the spray comes out of the shell in a long blue ribbon, higher than the gulls, over the bins and the car park and the dead lamp by the bike shed. It catches the security light and hangs there like washing on a line. Dad's van pulls in below. He stops in the middle of the road with the engine running and looks up, and he doesn't wave. He just stands still and lets the water fall on him.

When you finally close the window the flat is quiet and smells only of chips. You hold the shell to your ear the way Nana showed you. The last chamber, the oldest one, is still wet at the edges, and you think it is probably the only room in the whole block that remembers where it came from.