Small black fine line shell tattoo on a person's lower abdomen, just above the waistband of blue denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small shell tattoo above the hip

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined shell is tattooed on bare skin at the lower abdomen, with a fan-shaped ridged design and a simple black line. A hand with one finger hooked into the top of the jeans sits at the lower right of the frame. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the tattoo is placed centrally and clearly in focus.

Fine line Other Shell

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

Up on the ninth floor of Hollins Court there lived a widow called Mary Corran, and every morning she took a bag of bread down in the lift for the gulls. The gulls were the only things in that block that came when they were called.

Keep reading

One winter the lift stopped for a month, so Mary took the stairs. On the landing between the sixth and seventh floors she found a scallop shell lying on the concrete where nobody had dropped it. It was the fan-shaped kind, with ridges like pleated cloth, and it was damp. She put it in her coat pocket and climbed on.

Her husband had brought shells like that home from Scarborough. He used to say the ridges were the lines a boat leaves when it pulls out of harbour, each one a little wave that never reached the shore. She had kept his shells in a biscuit tin, and the tin had gone to the charity shop years ago.

That night the lift came back on, and Mary rode it down to feed the gulls. When the doors opened at the bottom, the corridor was not the one she knew. Grey water ran along the floor and the air smelt of salt. She set the shell on the step, and the water carried it out past the bins, towards wherever the sea had got to. The gulls followed it. Mary went back up in the lift, which never stopped at the sixth floor again.