Black line drawing flash on paper of a conch, a fan shell and a nautilus shell, each decorated with clusters of blossom, with a pen on the left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seashells and blossom flash sheet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three shells: a conch at the upper left, a fan shell at the upper right and a spiralled nautilus at the bottom centre, each with clusters of five-petalled blossoms. The work uses bold black linework with hatching on the shell ridges and no shading, and it is drawn on white paper. The composition is spread across the sheet with open space between the motifs.

Botanical Seashell Blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheet had been on the drying line since Tuesday, pegged by its corners to the bench in my aunt's back room above Pengelly's chandlery, and the wind off the harbour kept lifting the corner where the nautilus sat. I weighted it down with the sharpener and went back to the kettle, because Mrs Rowe from the bakery had been waiting a fortnight for her conch and was not a woman who waited quietly.

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My aunt drew everything in black, never grey, because she said grey was what people reached for when they were afraid to commit. She taught me the ridges first: a run of hatching that follows the lip of a shell like the ribs of a boat's hull, each line a little shorter as it climbs toward the spire. The blossoms came after, five petals apiece, and she would never let me draw them until I had looked at the plum trees on Trewartha hill, which dropped their petals onto the lane every April.

The fan shell was the hard one. Aunt Nell spent a whole winter on it, working out how the ribs spread from the hinge like the folds of a paper fan, and how a cluster of blossom could sit over the join without hiding it. She never finished the little teardrop stone she had sketched beneath it. When I asked why, she said some things were better left as a question on the page.

On Saturday the sheet went up in the shop window beside the tide timetable. By noon a stranger from Plymouth had photographed it twice and asked whether the nautilus could be drawn larger, so the blossoms spilled off its curl. I said I would think about it. Then I took the red pen Nell kept for corrections and drew the bigger shell in the margin, its spiral opening outward toward the sea, and I left the sheet pinned up where anyone passing could see it.