Colour tattoo behind an ear showing a purple shell, a black fork and an orange starfish with small teal dots, placed behind the ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shell, fork and starfish behind the ear

Other · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a healed or fresh tattoo behind an ear, showing a purple scallop shell, a black fork angled diagonally, and an orange starfish with dark dots. Small teal dots are scattered around the motifs. The bold black outlines are clean and even, with flat fills in each colour, and the design sits against the skin with a silver stud earring above it.

Other Shell Starfish Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hilda Crane found the fork on the morning the tide went out past the breakwater, lying tines-up in the wrack as though it had been waiting for a dinner party. She carried it up the nine hundred steps in her coat pocket, and by teatime it sat polished beside the kettle, where the gulls could see it through the glass and take offence.

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Gerald, the starfish who lived in the rock pool below the cottage, took one look and declared it a trident. He had been waiting most of his life for a proper one, he said, and meant to hold it up the next time the sea got above itself. Mrs Crane said it was a fork, had always been a fork, and that forks did not go to sea unless somebody was careless with the cutlery.

The argument ran for three days, through two gales and a visit from the vicar's wife, until Gerald's dots had gone a sulky green. The scallop shell on the windowsill, who had ignored them both the whole time, finally said, 'It's a fork, Gerald. You're spotted, not sceptred.' Gerald sulked into the weed for the rest of the afternoon.

Mrs Crane wrapped the fork in a tea towel at low water and carried it down the rocks. 'Hold that up for the storm,' she said, laying it in the pool beside him. 'It'll do more good than a kettle.' By morning the fork was gone, and on the step sat a purple shell with a neat row of tine-width grooves scored along its ribs. Gerald said nothing at all, which was how she knew he was pleased.