Watercolour style tattoo of a scallop shell above a nautilus shell on a calf, with black linework and washes of orange, yellow and blue.

Scallop and nautilus shells on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A scallop shell sits above a spiral nautilus shell, both outlined in loose black linework. Soft orange, yellow, blue and green washes bleed through the shells and spread around them, with darker grey shading on the lower shell. The shells are stacked vertically and fill the upper calf.

Calf Scallop shell Shell Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has left the boats lying on their sides in the mud at Ostia, and you are the one who must walk out to them before the gulls get the best of the catch. Your uncle Lucius sends you with a basket and a bronze hook, and tells you not to come back with anything that cracks when you lift it.

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The scallops are easy. They lie open in the shallows like hands that have stopped asking for something, their fans ribbed and orange where the sun has got into them. The nautilus is harder. It rolls in the deep channel where the water goes green and the light comes down in bars, and when you finally pull one up its chambers are full of sea and it smells of iron and old bread. You hold it up and the spiral turns in your palm like a question nobody has bothered to finish.

Lucius wants to sell the pale ones to a dyer near the Forum and keep the spirals for the shrine of the sea mother, because the priests pay in copper for anything with a perfect curl. You don't tell him that you have already counted the chambers of the one you kept back, or that there are more of them than there should be for a shell so young. You tuck it into the folds of your tunic and walk home along the wet sand with the scallops knocking against the basket like coins.

That night you set the nautilus on the sill and watch the lamp flicker through its open side until the oil runs dry. In the morning the sea has come up the street in the dark, a thin silver line along the doorstep, and the spiral is gone from the sill. Only the scallops remain, lined up in a neat row, all facing the same way, as though someone has been counting too.