Colour tattoo of an open scallop shell holding a pearl, in a traditional style with bold black outlines and pink, purple and teal shading, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open shell and pearl on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of an open scallop shell with a pale pearl sitting in its centre. The ribbed shell has bold black outlines, with pink and purple gradient shading and teal accents along the rim. The design is centred on the forearm against plain skin and a light grey wall.

Traditional Forearm Shell Scallop shell Pearl Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mary Penhale had been told twice not to carry scallops up the harbour steps in a bucket with the lid off, and now the bucket lay on its side and a gull was walking off with the best of them. She chased the bird along the wet cobbles, kicking at it with her clogs until it flapped onto the chapel wall. Behind her, the new schoolmaster, Arthur Coode, stood with his shoes full of seawater, watching her as if she were the most interesting thing to happen in Porthkerris since the war.

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She had one left to show for the morning, a heavy scallop with ribs like a comb, dredged off the Shag Rock on the last spring tide. She had been keeping it for her mother's birthday, though she had not decided what she would say when she handed it over. Arthur crouched beside her and asked what was inside. Mary said nobody knew until they opened it, then took her knife from her apron pocket and worked the hinge loose on the kitchen step while the tide ran out behind the breakwater.

Tucked in the frill where the shell curled round its softness sat a pearl the colour of skimmed milk, with a faint blush of pink along one side. Mary held it to the window and the light went through it like a boiled sweet. Her father would have sold it to the jeweller in Penzance for enough to mend the nets. Arthur only said the shell was the prettier thing, all those ridges fanning out in lilac and rose, and offered a shilling to draw it. She looked from the pearl to the shell and, for once, did not know which one she was meant to keep.

The next morning she carried the pearl up the hill to the schoolhouse. The shell sat on his desk in a square of sun, already outlined in heavy black ink, and he had blotted the pink across its rim with his thumb so it softened like dusk on water. Mary set the pearl down in the shell's hollow, where it fitted as if it had always been waiting there, and neither of them said anything for a while.