Woman seen from behind on a boat in a bikini, with a gold metallic sea turtle tattoo on her upper back near the shoulder.

Gold sea turtle tattoo on upper back

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman seen from behind, seated on a boat with her long hair blowing across her back. A gold metallic sea turtle with an ornate patterned shell and small bubbles sits on her upper back near the shoulder, shown as flat single-tone ink. A small dark tattoo is also visible on the back of one hand, and the background shows boat wake on the water.

Shoulder Hand Sea turtle Bubble Metallic Boat Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Quick had gilded the names of three hundred boats in her life, and never once a turtle, so when the fish crate came up the Padstow slipway she made the lad who carried it wait while she unwrapped the tea towel. Inside was a sea turtle carved from pale driftwood, its shell cut in whorls like the inside of a conch, and tied to one flipper a card in careful capitals: GILD THE SHELL. LEAVE THE BUBBLES BARE.

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She worked on it through the grey weeks of March with a squirrel-hair brush and a pot of size gone soft in the warm. Each whorl took the length of a tide to fill, and each time she lifted the leaf the gold caught the strip light and looked freshly poured. The bubbles she left alone, a scatter of raw wood rising from the turtle's beak, because the card had asked and because it seemed to her that a thing going up toward the air ought to stay unfinished.

Nobody came for it. The lad said the man who left it had been a diver out of St Mary's, who went down to a wreck one autumn and came back up without his boat, only with his lamp. Nell did not ask what he had been looking for. She set the turtle in the front window facing the harbour mouth, where the evening light could reach it.

On the last night of the month the tide ran high and the water through the glass turned the shell into a moving stripe of copper. In the morning a single gold flake lay on the sill, bright as a coin, and beneath the card she found a second line in the same careful hand: LET IT WEAR.