Watercolour-style nautilus shell tattoo with a black outline and blue, green and purple washes, on the elbow.

Watercolour nautilus shell on an elbow

Other · Colour · Photo

A nautilus shell is shown in profile, with its spiral chambers drawn in fine black lines on the upper left. The body of the shell is filled with loose blue, purple and green washes that fade into white areas, giving a painted watercolour effect. The tattoo is photographed close up on the elbow against a dark background, with small ink splatters near the outline.

Other Shell Spiral

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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 count the chambers the way other people count sheep, lying awake in the crew cabin on the Hull night ferry while the engine thuds up through the bunk. Thirty-one of them, each a small sealed room the animal built as it grew and then abandoned, spiralling in towards the pale lip where the living part once sat.

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Your gran kept the shell on the sill of her flat above the chip shop on Anlaby Road, and when the council man came to clear the place he pressed it into your hand as if it were a bill you owed. Blue had bled into the body of it over the years, green where the lamplight from the bingo hall fell, purple caught in the grooves. You told yourself you would sell it to someone who collected ornaments.

Instead you walk the wet length of the Humber Dock wall at two in the morning, past the sodium lamps and the shuttered warehouses, the shell heavy in your coat pocket. The water is black and moves like an old coat being shaken out. Somewhere a ship sounds its horn twice, then stops, and the city hums the way it only does when nobody is watching.

You hold the shell out over the edge and let go. It goes down pale side first, turning slowly, the colour lifting off it like breath off glass until there is only white, then only the lamps trembling on the surface. Thirty-one rooms, and you walk home with your hands still cold for hours.