Four small black sea turtles in a diagonal line with faint wave shading on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Four sea turtles across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Four solid black sea turtle silhouettes are arranged in a diagonal line across the upper back, each with a small flipper detail. Faint brownish wave or swirl shading sits beside the turtles, softening the edges of the line. The ink is black on warm skin, with a patterned top and a silver cross necklace visible at the edge of the frame.

Back Sea turtle Turtle Wave Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea had always been a long way off from the village of Carrow, and the four little turtles knew it. Their mother had laid them in the warm sand above the tideline the summer the fishing boats went out and did not all come back. She dug the nest with her back flippers, covered it over, and then went out past the breakers without looking round, which is what sea turtles do.

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The eldest hatched first and set off straight for the water, with the second close behind. The third stopped to look at a gull, and the fourth was small and slow and kept losing the others in the wrack. An old woman named Hester Vane, who kept goats on the dune path, saw them from her kitchen window and wondered whether to pick the last one up. She decided against it. Her grandmother had told her that carrying a thing to the sea only teaches it to want carrying.

So she watched. The first three reached the wet sand as the ebb drew back. The fourth made it to the line of foam just as the tide turned, and a wave curled over it, rolled it end over end, and set it down again a little further along the shore, where the water was only ankle deep and ran sideways in a long pale swirl. The little turtle lay there and blinked. Hester said afterwards that it looked as if it had been expecting that all along.

Next morning she found the four of them out past the rocks, heads up, in a line that bent with the current like a stitched seam. She put her hand over her eyes against the sun and counted them twice, then went back up the path to milk the goats.