Fine line black tattoo of a nautilus spiral with overlapping circles, triangles and dotted geometric lines on a forearm.

Nautilus spiral and geometric lines on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A nautilus-style spiral shell fills the centre of the design, drawn in thin single-needle linework with a dotted outer arc. Overlapping circles, triangles, radiating lines and a long arrow sit around the shell, all in fine black lines with no shading. The composition is a single-colour, open geometric piece photographed close up on a limb against a dark background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Spiral Circle Triangle Arrow Dot Geometric line

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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

Sit down, lad, the 9.40 is always late and you've time for the tale. My gran kept the signal box at Hollin Bridge, where the up line curls round the old mill like a shell coiling in on itself. The engineers sent her a ledger full of angles and she fed it to the stove, because the ledger had never stood on that bend in a frost.

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Instead she chalked the curve on the box floor, one chamber after another, each a little wider than the one before, the way a shell grows. Circles for the wheel gauges, three triangles for the warning boards, a line of dots where the sleepers ran out under the ice. Every spring she walked the spiral with her thumb and the points moved without a sound. The drivers swore the line knew its own way.

The winter of the flood the chalk washed away in the first night. She went up the ladder with a pot of ink and the nib her father had used for printing tickets, and she drew it all again, then a long arrow from the box down to the river wall, pointing where the water would climb. Nobody believed her. The next morning the Leeds goods stopped dead on the spiral, because the culvert under the rails had gone in the night, and the arrow was the only mark on the wall that the water had reached.

That's the drawing they still hang in the waiting room, framed in the old brass. Mind the step on your way out, and check the board. The 9.40 will come round the spiral soon enough.