Geometric sea turtle tattoo with black outline and watercolour-style colour fills in blue, purple, pink and green, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Geometric sea turtle on the forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle is drawn in black lines built from straight facets, with the head, flippers and tail all shown in angular segments. The shell is divided into hexagonal and pentagonal panels filled with soft blue, purple, pink, green and yellow shading that blends like watercolour. The turtle sits centrally on a pale inner forearm against a plain light background.

Geometric Forearm Sea turtle Turtle Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Tobiah had sent you down to the cellar for the tallow, and you came back up with the wrong jar and a cough full of damp. Behind you the glazier was already cursing the north window, because the lead had sprung again and the panes of the sea scene had slid out of true like water in a bucket.

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The old glass had come from a ship that broke on the Cornish rocks in the year the abbey was rebuilt. Nobody knew who had cut it. Tobiah said it had been pieced together by a drowned man's widow who wanted her husband's turtle kept dry forever. You didn't believe him, but you held the lamp while the glazier lifted each hexagon of blue and violet and rose, and you noticed that no two shapes matched, that every seam ran straight as a ruler and still the whole thing swam.

On the last morning of the repair the sun came through the glass and laid its colours across the flagstones, a bruise of violet by the altar and a pool of green near your boots. The turtle's flippers seemed angled to push off from the stone, as if the whole abbey were a reef it had agreed to leave.

The glazier packed his tools and asked what you would do now. You said you would stay until the lead set, and he laughed, because you both knew it had set days ago. Outside, the bell began for vespers. You stayed anyway, watching the pink panel drift slowly across the floor as the sun moved, and waited for the light to leave the sea.