Black and grey fine line tattoo of a nautilus shell spiral with dotted construction lines, sitting on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Nautilus spiral on upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a nautilus-style spiral shell sits on the upper chest, close to the shoulder and collarbone. Its outline and interior chambers are drawn with thin solid and dotted lines, with small dots and a straight guide line suggesting a geometric construction. The ink is black on pale skin against a dark background, and the composition is centred on the spiral with a few sparse lines extending to the left and lower right.

Fine line Geometric Chest Shoulder Shell Spiral Dotted line Dot

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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

Put the kettle on again, love, that one's gone cold while I was talking. Right. The room at the top of the stairs, the one with the brass bed that squeaks when you turn over. A woman called Edie Marr took it every August for nineteen summers, and she never once paid in advance, which tells you what sort of woman she was.

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She was a draughtswoman for the harbour board, and she drew shells on the backs of every bill I ever sent her. Not pretty ones. Nautilus, she said, because that animal does the most sensible thing in the sea. It builds a room, seals it off, and moves into a bigger one, and the old rooms stay behind it, full of air to keep it afloat. She drew the spiral with a compass, then drew dotted lines inside it, marking where the next chamber would sit before it was grown. 'Plans,' she said, 'for a house it hasn't got yet.'

The last August, she didn't come down for breakfast. I took the tray up and found her sitting in that brass bed with a pencil and a ruler, and she'd drawn one more curve on the wallpaper, from the picture rail down to the skirting, dotted all the way. 'Leave that,' she said. 'Somebody will want to finish it.'

I never did paper over it. Forty years of lodgers have slept under that spiral, and every one of them asks what it means. I tell them the same thing: it's the bit you draw before you've decided to move.