Colour tattoo of an open clam shell holding a white pearl, with traditional-style outlines, on a bare limb beside other ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open clam shell with pearl on a limb

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an open clam shell with a white pearl at its centre, drawn with bold dark outlines. The shell is shaded in soft pinks, peach and grey, with lighter highlights along its ridges. Partial tattoos of a leaf at the top right and an orange and black design at the lower left sit on the same skin, against a pale sandy background.

Traditional Other Pearl Shell Leaf Sand

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 tide had left the rocks at Porthmerryn with their mouths open, and Nell Tregear went along them with a bucket and a bread knife, prising at anything that stayed shut. Her brother had said the big one by the drowned steps held a pearl. He said that about most things, but this shell was too wide to be ordinary, its two halves pale as the inside of a teacup and ridged like a fan.

Keep reading

She got the blade in on the third try. Nested in the wet pink flesh was a pearl the size of a pea, so white it looked lit from inside. She held it up to the grey sky and the whole cove went quiet around her. She put it in her apron pocket, where it knocked against her ribs all the way up the hill, and by supper she had decided what it would buy: a boat of her own, a door that shut properly, a life with no more bucket.

Her grandmother took one look at her face and set down the bread. 'Where's the shell?' Nell said she had left it on the rocks. The old woman went to the window and watched the sea turning over the bay. She said the clam had been wrapping one grain of sand in its own soft body for years, layer on layer, until the grit was smooth enough to bear. 'That's all a pearl is,' she said, 'a stone that wouldn't leave.'

Nell walked back down in the dusk with the water already creeping over the steps. She knelt on the cold stone, eased the shell open with her thumbs, and pressed the pearl back into its pink cradle. The halves closed with a small wet sound, like a latch. When she stood up the sea had covered the rock, and the pearl was somewhere under it, exactly where it had been.