Nautilus Oval Card

During the Victorian era, disembodied hands were commonly used in jewelry, greeting cards, and homewares. They symbolize love, strength and fidelity. Chiromancy was popular during the time, which means hands might have been seen as possessing intimate insight into a person.

Nautilus are strange, prehistoric creatures. The earliest nautilus fossils date back hundreds of millions of years ago, to the Triassic Period, and closely resemble today’s nautilus species.

They are living fossils, a link to a lost world. Their spiral shells are made up of many internal chambers, the largest of which contains the living body of the nautilus. As the nautilus ages, it forms a new chamber to house its growing body, leaving behind a successively smaller series of chambers. In doing so, each nautilus holds in its shell a record of its past selves, a home perpetually outgrown, but never abandoned.