Black tribal-style manta ray tattoo with a long tail running down the spine, and a smaller turtle on the lower back of a woman's bare back.

Manta ray and turtle on a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up, seen from behind with her arm raised, shows a large manta ray tattoo across her upper back with a thin tail extending down the spine. A smaller turtle sits on the lower back above the waistband of her patterned trousers. The tattoos are rendered in solid black ink with bold swirling interior patterns and clean edges, set against warm, softly lit skin and a red patterned wall hanging.

Blackwork Back Turtle Tail Spine Swirl Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill the week the river ran low, and the last wagon in the line carried a tin bath of brackish water with a ray in it. Old Tamsin Reeve kept it under a sheet by day and let the children lift the corner only after the tuppence was paid. Nobody in the village knew how a flat grey thing had got so far from the sea, and Tamsin never said, except to remark that the ray had come inland in search of its turtle.

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The turtle, she said, had been sold at Bristol to a tinker travelling north, who painted spirals on its shell and carried it off from fair to fair. The ray had followed the cart for three counties, its long thin tail trailing the ruts like a rope, sliding through puddles and ditches whenever the road ran wet. Some nights the ray lay flat against the side of the bath and the water shivered, and the children said it was only the wheels.

On the last night before the fair moved on, the tinker came to the field with the turtle in a sack. He was a thin man with a sunburnt neck, and he would not look at the bath. Tamsin tipped the water out onto the grass. The ray spread itself wide over the wet ground, shuddered once, and rose into the dusk above the hedge, slow as a kite. The turtle went under the wagon and did not come out again.

Tamsin folded the sheet and went to bed. She never saw either of them again, though a boy from the next village swore that a flat shadow crossed the moon over the estuary that autumn, trailing a thin tail behind it like a line let out from a boat.