Colour cartoon turtle in a purple mask holding a bo staff, tattooed on the front of an ankle and lower leg.

Cartoon turtle with bo staff on ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A chibi-style cartoon turtle in a purple mask sits cross-legged and holds a brown bo staff across its body. The turtle has bold dark outlines, smooth flat fills and a yellow plastron, with the skin tone showing through its head and limbs. The tattoo sits on the front of the ankle against a pale leg, and the photograph shows a matching turtle-print slingback shoe on the foot.

Ankle Turtle Cartoon Mask Shoe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in our family went near the Kestrel Arcade after nine, and Mum said so every time I came in late from the bakery. But Mr Okafor kept his back-room comic stall shuttered only halfway until gone eleven, and he had a crate of old Turtles issues he wanted shifted. I had eleven quid in my apron pocket and a bad mood left over from my cousin calling me soft for still owning a purple mask.

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I found the one with Donatello on the cover, his bo staff across his shoulders and his mask the colour of a bruise. Mr Okafor took the eleven pounds without looking up from his crossword and told me the rain would be proper by the time I reached the canal. It was. The pages stuck together in my coat as I cut past the bins behind the Odeon, the sodium lamps buzzing over the wet pavement like a kettle nobody had switched off.

By the footbridge a boy of about nine sat on the low wall with a bag of chips going soggy in his lap. He had lost his mum's brolly and was crying in the quiet, careful way kids do when they think someone bigger will tell them off. I didn't say anything clever. I just sat down and gave him the comic. He opened it under the lamp, found the page where the little turtle sits cross-legged, staff laid over his knees, waiting for his brothers to finish arguing, and he laughed so hard the chips went everywhere.

I kept one copy back for myself, the one with the orange-tinted cover. Whenever a late bus rolls over that footbridge I think of the boy on the wall, still waiting for the others to stop arguing and get on with it.