Black silhouette design of five sea turtles swimming diagonally, decreasing in size from top left to bottom right, with scale-patterned shells and outlined flippers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five sea turtles swimming in a diagonal line

Black and grey · Flash

Five solid black sea turtles swim in a diagonal line, the largest at the top left and each smaller one trailing towards the lower right. Each shell is outlined and filled with a pattern of overlapping scale segments, and the flippers are drawn as bold, simple shapes. The design uses only black on a white background, with the turtles evenly spaced and facing the same direction.

Sea turtle Turtle Shell Flipper

Find an artist for this

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

Mags had been painting the same five turtles onto the canvas cover since the fair left Hull, and the paint on the smallest one had already cracked. She had the brush in her teeth when Dennis came round the back of the dodgems, shouting that the aquarium man had gone off with the float money and the lorry was hitched.

Keep reading

"Leave the tank," he said. "Nobody's paying to look at turtles at ten o'clock on a Tuesday."

She spat the brush into the jar. The tank had come off a trawler in Grimsby, its glass scratched with the names of men who had wanted to be somewhere else. Inside there had only ever been brackish water and a plastic turtle that kept floating to the top. So Mags had painted the cover instead, black on white, the big turtle leading at the corner and the rest trailing after it on a slant, all facing the same way, so the crowd at the gate would believe something was moving on the other side of the canvas.

She had painted the small one first, the summer her mum still worked the candyfloss stall and sang along to the generator. Mags pressed her thumb to its shell, still tacky, and rolled the canvas tight around the frame. The lorry door clanged shut and the field went dark behind them.

On the drive south she sat in the cab with the roll across her knees, and somewhere past Peterborough she unrolled one corner to check the paint. Five turtles swam on in a line across the cloth, each one a little smaller than the last, all of them headed for a coast none of them had ever reached.