Colourful nautilus shell tattoo with a red geometric flower of life pattern behind it, placed on the upper back.

Rainbow nautilus shell over a flower of life on back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A spiral nautilus shell sits over a red-brown mandala built from overlapping flower of life circles. The shell is shaded with blended bands of yellow, orange, pink, green and blue that radiate from the centre spiral. The outer geometric pattern is drawn in fine, even lines and is centred on the upper back, with a plain skin background.

Geometric Back Shell Spiral Flower of life Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shell had come out of a bucket of sea-washed junk won at the Whitsun fair, and Maud Tennant had been trying to get the blue out of its spiral since Tuesday. The generator on the Waltzer had died again, so she worked in the caravan with a paraffin lamp and a jam jar of dye, dipping the nautilus one band at a time. Yellow first, then orange, then the pinks that Dennis wanted for the Spinning Wheel stall, where the punters paid a shilling to take home a shell that looked like it had been dragged through a rainbow.

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Dennis had no patience for craft. He wanted two hundred by Saturday, each one with a little stencilled pattern of overlapping circles on the back, the sort the old woman at the palmistry tent swore kept the ocean from getting in. Maud cut the stencils from a tin lid and a bit of card, and by the second night she had stopped minding the pattern and started minding the spiral. It went inward the way the rides went round, tighter and tighter, until the chambers were too small to hold any colour at all.

On the last night the lamp guttered while she was feeding the green into the outer whorl, and the dye ran the wrong way, flooding out past the edge of the shell into the wood of the table. She sat with her hands flat on the cold bench and let it spread. Out past the caravan step the fair was folding itself up, canvas rolling, horses being walked to the lorries, and the sea was a grey line beyond the car park.

In the morning she packed the good shell into a tissue box, the one nobody would buy, and left it on the sill where the sun came through. The blue had settled into the last chamber like something that had decided to stay. She counted the turns with her fingertip until she lost the number, and the fair pulled out of the field without her.