Small black fine line tattoo of a conch shell with light hatching on the side of an ankle.

Small conch shell on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a conch shell with a spiral opening sits on the side of the ankle. It is drawn in a thin black outline with short hatched strokes that suggest shading along the shell's ridges. The ink is black on a light skin tone, and the photo is taken close up against a patterned fabric background.

Fine line Ankle Shell Seashell

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You want to know about the shell, then sit where the wind can't get at you, because I'll not tell it twice. My uncle Tobias brought it home from a ship that went to the Indies and came back with nothing else worth mentioning. He said he'd bought it off a boy for a tin of tobacco, and the boy swore it was a horn for calling the drowned home. Uncle Tobias never believed a word of that, but he blew it every evening when the fog rolled in off the Stell, long low notes that went out over the water like a cow lowing for its calf.

Keep reading

The boats came home to it. Nineteen summers he did it, and nobody lost a man in fog while he was on the cliff. My mother said that was the shell and my father said it was the tides, and they argued it across the supper table for the whole of my childhood. I learned to net from Mrs Pollard two doors down, and I learned the horn from him, how the breath had to travel round the spiral the same way the shell turns, or the note came out thin and tinny like a kettle.

The winter he died, the lip of the shell split clean along one ridge. Nobody could mend it, so I kept it on the windowsill where the salt could get at it. Then in February the Marjorie Lane went out with my brother Sam aboard and the fog came down like wet sacking. I ran up the cliff path with the shell under my arm and blew until my ribs ached. The crack hissed, but the note still went out, low and wavering, round the spiral the way he taught me.

They came in one at a time, oars knocking, Sam last. He stood on the quay with his hair full of spray and said, Aunt, you sound like a cow with a grievance. I told him it was the only horn we had left. The shell is on my sill still, cracked and salt-white, and when the fog comes I still pick it up and blow, though the sound is thinner now and the boats mostly find their own way home.