Coloured pencil drawing of a blue turtle creature with a brown shell peering over a grey anchor inside a rope frame, with blue water swirls above, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Blue turtle creature on an anchor and rope

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A blue turtle-like creature with a brown shell and large dark claws rests its forearms on a grey anchor, set within a twisted brown rope frame. Blue and grey water swirls rise from the top of the design, which is shaded with soft brown smudging that forms a border around the drawing on a sketchbook page.

Neo-trad Turtle Anchor Rope Water Creature Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate swore the creature had come up in the bottom of the lobster pot, sat on the flukes of the spare anchor like a dog on a doorstep. Nobody aboard the Mary Ellen believed him until Tom Garrow lifted the hatch and saw the blue thing blinking up at him, its brown shell domed like a rounded hull and its black claws hooked over the iron.

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It would not be put back in the sea. Each dusk it hauled itself onto the bow and faced the harbour lights of Staithes, watching the boats come in with the look of a foreman counting crates. Old Ada at the chandlery said such things were bad luck to meddle with, so they fed it mackerel heads and left it be, and the rope they had coiled for the spring nets began to fray along the rail in a neat, twisting pattern that no knife had cut.

The October gale caught them two miles out. The engine coughed and died, and the Ellen slewed broadside to the swell while the spare anchor went over with a roar of chain. Tom went forward to cut the line and found the creature already there, forearms braced on the iron, shoulders tight beneath its shell, holding the flukes down against the drag. Spray sheeted over them both. He lost count of the hours, and when the light came grey and thin the boat was still pointing at the harbour mouth.

The creature was gone. Where it had crouched there was only a ring of wet on the deck, drying into a spiral of salt. Tom never told the mate what he had seen, and every autumn after that he left a mackerel head on the bow for whatever had kept the anchor from dragging.