Colour tattoo of an orange and yellow hibiscus flower with black tribal-style turtle flippers on a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus and turtle on a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

An orange and yellow hibiscus flower with a dark centre and a black stamen sits in the middle of the design. Bold black outlines form the turtle's flippers and head around the flower, with curled, ornamental detailing inside the petals. The tattoo is shown in colour on pale skin, photographed close up from above.

Botanical Other Turtle Hibiscus Flower Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair nearer to the range, love, the wind's off the bay and it gets into the bones of this house. You'll want to hear about the turtle that came up Porthkerris beach the summer the Penhale boarding house lost its last paying guest to the rain. Nobody believed my grandmother when she said the creature was carrying a flower on its back.

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It was a green turtle, older than the tide tables, and she had swum all the way up from warmer water because the sea where she was born had gone thick and sour. Nan found her at first light, flippers scraping the shingle, and where her shell should have been there sat a hibiscus as orange as a marmalade jar, the petals curled at their edges like someone had ironed them with a patient hand. A black stamen stood up through the middle like a little mast. The turtle's flippers were inked in black, all swirls and sharp hooks, the way the fishermen's wives used to stitch their collars.

Grandfather wanted to sell the cove to the men from Truro who talked about a hotel with a lift. Nan wouldn't have it. She carried that turtle up the back steps in a wet tea towel and set her in the scullery sink, and for three nights the bloom sat open on the draining board, heavier with dew each morning, until the guests started leaving bunches of sea pinks on the sill to see it. The lodgers said they could smell salt and oranges at once.

On the fourth morning the scullery was empty, the sink dry, and a trail of wet sand ran out the back door and down to the water. Nan never said where the flower went. She only said the turtle had paid her rent in full, and that if you walked the tideline in July with bare feet you might still find a bloom pressed into the sand where the waves had not quite reached.