Four hand-drawn sea turtle designs stacked vertically on white, each with spiral flippers and a petal-patterned shell, in green and one brown line drawing.

Four sea turtle designs with spiral flippers

Colour · Flash

Four stacked turtle designs, each with curled spiral flippers and a round shell filled with a four-petal or flower motif. Three are drawn in green pencil or marker with smooth outlines and soft shading, while the second uses dark brown linework with hatched petals. The designs sit on a plain white background and vary in size and detail.

Sea turtle Turtle Spiral Petal Flower Shell Flipper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea had taken the last of the lobster pots off Porthgwidden again, and Old Nan Tregear said it was the turtle's doing. She stood on the slip with her hands tucked in her apron and pointed past the harbour wall, where the water went from green to grey. 'She's out there,' she said. 'Swimming the long way round, same as always.'

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Nobody had seen the turtle in forty years, but everyone had heard of her. She came up in the wrong months, with a shell like a clover field and flippers curled tight as fiddleheads, and she only ever surfaced where someone was about to lose something. My brother Tom laughed at that. He laughed harder when he rowed out alone the next morning while the wind was still turning.

I found him at dusk, drifting a cable off the rocks with the oars shipped and his cap in his lap. The water around the boat lay flat as a plate and warm as bathwater, and something broad and slow was circling underneath, its spiralled flippers opening and closing like clocks winding down. Tom wasn't frightened. He was counting the petals on its back, one, two, three, four, over and over, as if they spelled a name.

When I brought the boat in, he'd stopped counting. 'She wanted me to know which one was mine,' he said, and he would not say more. Nan took the pots back in the spring and never asked where they'd gone. Some mornings, past the wall, the water still goes green in a perfect ring, and nobody rows out to see.