Small sea turtle design with a green glitter shell and black outlined flippers on orange-toned skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Glitter sea turtle on skin

Mixed · Photo

A sea turtle viewed from above, with a head, two front flippers and a rear flipper in black outline. The shell is filled with hexagonal segments of green glitter that catch the light, with black borders between them. The turtle is centred on a close crop of skin in warm orange tones.

Sea turtle Turtle Shell Flipper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The turtle came up from the quay in the bottom of a fish crate, wrapped in a bit of oilcloth, and nobody on the barge could say who had sent it. Mrs Ackroyd thinks it was the chandler's boy. Pa thinks it was the tide. It is no bigger than my palm, the shell cut into honeycomb plates of green so bright that when the lamp catches it the whole thing throws little sparks across the galley ceiling. Black outlines run round every plate, and the flippers are black too, one folded tight at the back as if it has been swimming a long way.

I set it on the wheelhouse sill where the afternoon sun comes through at four. Pa says sea turtles don't come up the Ouse, and he is right, they don't. But they come up in the stories his father told on the Humber, so that is near enough for a barge. I wrote the names of every river we have ever moored on across the back of the crate lid, Aire, Don, Wharfe, Trent, and none of them had a turtle in it.

On Thursday the lock keeper at Naburn asked what I had got there, and I held it up and he laughed and said it was the first thing he'd seen all year that looked like it knew where it was going. That night I took it out on the foredeck and set it on the water at the bow, just to see. It sat on the brown surface and did not sink, because glitter does not sink, it only glitters. The current carried it under the bridge and the sparks went on for a long way after it, down past the willows toward the open estuary, where Pa says the sea is.

Love, Nell