Small fine line black tattoo of a scallop shell on the lower leg, with a thin cord anklet visible below it.

Scallop shell on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A small scallop shell outline sits on the lower leg, drawn in thin black lines with radiating ridges fanning out from the hinge at the base. The shading is minimal, with the design built almost entirely from single lines on bare skin. A thin dark cord anklet is visible lower down, and the background is a soft, warm-toned bed with stripes.

Fine line Calf Shell Scallop shell Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair pitched on the sand at Mablethorpe every August, and by the third week the big wheel's paint had gone grey with salt. Nell worked the coconut shy because her uncle's hands shook too badly now for the rifle stall, and because she could tell the wooden balls apart by the sound they made in the cups.

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On the Thursday a boy came to the shy with a fistful of coins and a scallop shell in his other hand. He said it had washed up under the pier and that his gran swore it was lucky for anyone who travelled. Would she take it in place of a go at the coconuts? Nell turned it over and admired the ridges fanning out from the hinge, pleated like the good wool of her mother's skirt, and told him the shell was worth at least three goes. He shrugged and handed it over anyway.

She kept it in the cash tin. That night, when the generator cut out and the rides ticked down in the dark, she held it under the lamp and found a small chip on one edge, shaped like a comma. Her uncle, half asleep in the van, said the sea always wanted its things back in the end, and that a chipped shell was only a shell that had been somewhere.

In the morning the boy did not come back. The fair moved on to Skegness, and Nell stitched the scallop into the lining of her coat, where it knocked against her ribs at every step, and she never once tried to give it away.