Coloured pencil drawing of an open shell holding a pearl, shaded in purple, pink and teal, with pencil ribbon swirls around it, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open shell with pearl and swirling ribbons

Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of an open scallop-style shell with a pearl resting inside its pale lower half. The shell is shaded in violet, pink, orange and blue, with soft highlights, and teal wisps extend out from both sides. Thin grey pencil swirls and ribbon-like curls frame the shell on a plain off-white background.

Shell Pearl Seashell Swirl Ribbon

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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

Gavin Pryce still had the lunchbox, or said he did, and he waved it at me across the buffet table like a raffle ticket that had won. Thirty years had thickened some of us and thinned others, but the hall still smelled of floor polish and warm squash, and the paper chains from our leavers' dance sagged above the stage exactly as before.

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The pact was made the summer we were fifteen, on the harbour wall at Porthcarrow, with four pounds of pooled pocket money and a scallop shell from the gift shop on Quay Street. It had a glass bead glued inside and a twist of blue wire we swore was the sea escaping. We agreed to bring it back to this hall and hand it over to whoever had kept it safest. Dawn Ellery had already cried twice in the car park about her divorce, so none of us was feeling generous.

Gavin admitted he'd lost his share in a house move somewhere around the second Thatcher government. Everyone laughed, then looked at me, because I had gone quiet and was rummaging in my handbag. I unwrapped the shell from a tea towel and set it on the tablecloth. Nobody had kept it, I told them, except me. It had lived in a biscuit tin under my bed for three decades, and I had never once opened it.

I eased the two halves apart with a butter knife. The bead slid out, rolled across the cloth, caught the strip lights, and stopped against Gavin's glass of squash, exactly where we had all been told it would not.