Teal scallop shell tattoo with a black outline and white highlights on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal scallop shell on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A scallop shell with a fanned, ribbed body and a small hinge at the base fills the frame. The shell is outlined in black, with teal and blue shading and pale highlights along each rib that give it dimension. The shell sits on pale skin against a blurred teal and white background.

Forearm Scallop shell Shell Seashell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ticket clerk at Saltmarsh Halt had a habit of giving away anything the sea left on the platform. Driftwood, a glass float, once a whole crab that walked off with the Tuesday post. So when the widow Pennick came down the steps one wet morning with a scallop shell in her apron pocket, he only nodded and asked which train she was waiting for.

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She said she was not waiting for a train. She said the shell had come up through the drain grating by the ticket hatch, fanned out like a hand, and that it had been knocking against the iron every time the 8:14 pulled in. Nobody had tried to pick it up for a week, because the shell was the colour of the harbour on a clear day and people did not like to look at it for long.

The clerk took it from her and turned it over. Each rib held a thin pale stripe, as if the light had been combed into it. At the hinge there was a small dark nick where the shell had lost a corner years back, and he thought of his mother, who had kept a bowl of these on the sill until the day she moved inland and left them behind.

The widow wanted to know whether it could be sent back. He said the sea did not take returns. So they went together to the end of the platform, where the rails ran straight out over the marsh, and he set the shell on the sleeper by the water. The next train was late, as they always were, and by the time it came the tide had turned, and the shell was gone.