Fine line scallop shell tattoo above the script word Cali in blue ink, placed on the side of the hip near the buttock.

Scallop shell and script name on the hip

Fine line · Other · Colour · Photo

A single-line scallop shell sits above the word Cali written in a flowing script, both in blue ink on pale skin. The shell is drawn with thin radiating lines and an open fan shape, while the lettering uses a looped, connected stroke. The tattoo is centred on the frame against a soft, blurred background with the edge of a dark garment visible on the right.

Fine line Lettering Other Scallop shell Shell Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court had been broken since Easter, so Maureen Dacey climbed the fourteen flights with a carrier bag cutting into her fingers and the housing office letter folded in her coat pocket. On the landing the window was open an inch, and the wind off the estuary carried salt and diesel up past the washing lines. She stopped at the sill to get her breath and saw the shell still sitting where she had left it that morning, a scallop her dad had brought home from Whitby in 1978, its ridges worn smooth by years of thumbs.

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Cali was on the sofa when she let herself in, school jumper on inside out, pretending not to have been waiting. She had the shell in both hands before Maureen had put the bag down. Why's it got all these lines? Cali asked. Maureen sat beside her and ran a fingertip from the hinge to the rim. Every one starts at the same point, she said, and goes out to the edge, so nothing gets lost on the way. Cali nodded as if this was a rule she had always suspected.

That evening the letter came out of the coat again, and Maureen read it twice at the kitchen table while Cali drew a fan of blue biro lines on the back of a maths sheet. The flat would be empty by the end of the month. Cali looked up and asked if they could still go to the sea on Saturday, since they'd promised. Maureen said yes before she could think about it.

When the kettle had boiled and gone cold, Maureen found Cali at the window, breathing on the glass and writing her name in the mist, the C looped the way Maureen had taught her. Maureen pressed the shell into the child's coat pocket, where the lining was torn, so that it would travel with them. The name stayed on the glass a while after they had gone to bed, fading from the top down, the C the last to go.