Realism-style tattoo of a snail with a striped brown shell and extended antennae, placed between the shoulder blades on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic snail on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A snail with a banded, spiralled brown shell and a grey-brown body extends its two antennae across the upper back. The shell has soft shading and highlights that give it a three-dimensional look, and the body and antennae are rendered with fine detail. The tattoo sits centrally on the back against pale skin, with the black straps of a top framing it.

Realism Back Shell Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The slag heap had been raining since breakfast, and the path up from the drift was a ribbon of black mud that sucked at my wellingtons. Dad's shift ended at two, and Mam had sent me with his flask and a dry jumper, because she said a man who had been underground for eight hours would catch his death on the walk home. I had got as far as the allotments when I saw the snail.

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It was crossing the path where the gravel gave out, its shell the colour of strong tea, banded in cream and rust, each whorl winding round into a point so small you had to look twice. Its two long horns were out, feeling the air, and the body under the shell was the grey of wet stone. I knew better than to touch it, but the rain was coming hard and the first boot through would flatten it, so I crouched and scooped it up in my palm. It pulled itself in a little, then, when nothing happened, began to walk across my hand as if my hand were a leaf.

Dad came up from the cage at twenty past two, black to the eyes, and laughed when he saw me standing in the rain with my hand held out like a waiter with a tray. He said the snail had the right idea, carrying its house about so it never had to wait for the dark to end. He lifted the lid of his tin, set the snail on the damp cloth beside his pasty, and said we'd show it to Mam before it went back to the hedge.

Mam was not impressed, but she found a jam jar with holes punched in the lid, and by teatime the snail had climbed to the top and stuck there, horns waving at the kitchen light. Dad sat with his boots off and watched it for a long time. The next morning he carried the jar back up the path himself, and he took the long way round past the allotments, though he never said why.