A realistic green and blue sea turtle tattoo with yellow spotted flippers, set against plain skin in the upper part of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green sea turtle on skin

Realism · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle swims diagonally across the upper left of the image, with a dark green and teal shell marked by faint geometric lines. Its flippers and head are shaded in olive, yellow and blue with soft gradients and dotted scale patterns. The tattoo sits on smooth, evenly lit skin, with the rest of the frame left as empty background.

Realism Sea turtle Turtle Shell Flipper

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had mended nets on the quay at Porthlanen for forty-one years, and she knew the sound a net made when something heavy had got tangled in it. On the morning of the north wind she heard that sound before the boats were in, walked down the slipway with her knife in her apron pocket, and found a green turtle thrashing in the mesh of a drowned trawl net, its flippers caught like washing on a line.

Keep reading

The creature was as big as a tea tray. Its shell had a sheen like the bottom of a bottle held to the light, dark green at the rim and teal where the sun struck it, with pale lines crossing it in tidy triangles. Ada knelt on the wet stones, talked to it the way she talked to the gulls, and worked the cord loose one knot at a time. Her husband, dead six winters, had always said she had the patience of a spider, and she had never told him he was wrong.

When the last loop slipped free, the turtle did not swim off at once. It lifted its head, looked at her with an eye like wet slate, and turned in a slow circle as if counting the moored boats. Then it slid off the step into the green water and was gone beyond the harbour wall.

After that Ada left a gap in every net she mended, a hand's width of open mesh near the bottom edge. When the fleet grumbled she only said the sea had its own rules about what it kept. Some mornings she stood on the slipway and watched the water, and once, far out past the wall, a shell turned over in the sun like a dropped coin and was gone.