Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a cartoon sea turtle with large expressive eyes, shown on the upper leg.

Cartoon sea turtle on a leg

Neo-trad · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon sea turtle with a large round head, big glossy eyes and a smiling mouth is shown in profile, with its flippers reaching forward. The tattoo uses bold black outlines and soft grey shading to give the shell and skin a rounded, three-dimensional look, with dark spots across the flippers and shell. The turtle is centred on a close crop of skin, with a faint pinkish tone in the shell.

Neo-trad Other Sea turtle Turtle Cartoon Eye Flipper Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Saltcombe believed the turtle could read, least of all Derek Fallow, who ran the bait stall on the harbour wall and kept a tin of pear drops behind the till. Yet every Tuesday the creature nosed in on the tide, bumped its round head against the bottom rung of the slipway ladder, and waited with those enormous eyes until someone brought it the Saltcombe Herald folded open at the crossword.

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Dora Penhallow, nine years old and the only person who had ever seen it smile, said it was looking for a word. Derek said turtles did not do crosswords. Dora said this one did, because it had the flippers for holding a pencil and the face of someone thinking very hard. Every week they tried. The answer was always five letters and always something to do with the sea, and the turtle always pointed first at the wrong answer, then at the right one, then at the gull on the lamppost, which Derek swore was cheating.

In August a storm tore the awning off the bait stall and sent it into the harbour, and the turtle did not come for three weeks. Dora cut out the crossword each Tuesday anyway and pinned it to the ladder with a clothes peg. On the fourth Tuesday the turtle returned with a shell scarred pale along one side and a bottle cap wedged under one flipper. Dora read the clue aloud: a home for everything that swims. She filled in the boxes herself, OCEAN in careful capitals, and the turtle, for once, did not argue. It slid the newspaper back towards her with a flipper and went off smiling into the grey water.