Colour tattoo of orange hibiscus and plumeria flowers with green leaves and black turtles on the top of a foot near the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus, plumeria and turtles on a foot

Traditional · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A healed or healing colour tattoo on the top of a foot shows an orange hibiscus with a smaller hibiscus and two plumeria blossoms in red and yellow tones. Green leaves sit beside the flowers, and black turtle outlines and fine black vine curls run across the instep towards the ankle. The linework is bold and solid, with flat, saturated fills and some soft shading in the petals.

Traditional Botanical Ankle Hibiscus Plumeria Flower Leaf Turtle Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtles came up the black sand the week Ana Kealoha's husband sold the last of the nets, and her mother, who had never trusted a man with a boat, said the sea was keeping accounts. Ana did not argue. Each dawn she walked the strand with a basket of red hibiscus cut from the church wall and laid the blooms above the tideline, where the honu lay heavy and patient, their eyes half closed against the rising sun.

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The hotel men came in June with measuring poles and a paper that said the wall of flowers would be cleared for a car park. Kimo signed it before his coffee cooled. That night Ana took a plumeria cutting from her mother's garden, wrapped it in wet newspaper, and planted it in the sand beside the gate, though everyone told her nothing would root there. She watered it from a tin cup each evening and told it about the price of nets.

In August the storm took the bay. Kimo's boat broke its mooring and he went after it in the dark, and Ana stood at the gate until her lantern guttered out. At first light she walked the beach. Turtle tracks crossed the sand in long curving lines, and every one of them ended at the young plumeria, where a dozen honu had come up and settled under its branches, as if they had been waiting for shade.

Kimo came in at noon, soaked and sheepish, towing the boat behind him with a rope in his teeth. He never signed the paper. The wall of hibiscus stayed, and so did the tree, which bloomed white and yellow the following spring, and the turtles kept coming ashore as though no one had ever told them to go elsewhere.