Neo-traditional colour tattoo on a forearm showing an open oyster with a pearl, framed by pink lilies, green leaves and turquoise splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open oyster with pearl and lilies on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pearl sits in an open oyster shell at the centre of the design, with two pink lilies, one above and one below, and green leaves around them. The shell and petals have bold black outlines, soft shading and highlights, and dotted chain lines run across the shell and lower lily. Pink, orange, green and turquoise ink dominate the colour palette, set against a plain dark background.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Shell Pearl Lily Flower Leaves Chain Splash

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

Nell Pardoe had opened eleven hundred oysters since the tide turned, and her knife had gone blunt on the last one. She wiped it on her apron and held the shell up to the lamp in the dredgers' shed at Ranscombe Hard, where wet oilskins hung from nails like drowned men. Her father had always said the pearls were a story the sea told to keep people dredging. She had never believed him, and she did not believe him now, not with the grit under her nails and the lamp spitting in the draught.

Keep reading

Tom Ashby, who bought the catch on Thursdays, had brought lilies. Pink ones from the glasshouse at Fenner's, wrapped in yesterday's newsprint and dripping on the bench. He stood them in a jam jar without a word, which was how he said most things. Inside the shell, the pearl sat on its bed of grey like a moon that had lost its way home. Nell turned it under the light. Tom asked what it would fetch. She said she didn't know, and that was the first honest thing she had told him in a year.

He offered to take it to the jeweller in Southend and bring back a price in a brown envelope. She shook her head and closed the shell over the pearl, pressing until the hinge clicked. Then she tied it with fishing twine and hung it on the nail beside her father's oilskin, where the first grey light from the door would find it every morning. Tom set the jar of lilies on the sill beneath it, and neither of them mentioned the price again.