Two small black turtle tattoos, one on an ankle and one on the top of a foot, in a simple bold outline style.

Matching turtle tattoos on two feet

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching small turtle designs sit on two different feet, one near the ankle bone and one on the top of the other foot. Each turtle has a solid black outline with a rounded shell and short limbs, drawn with simple, even linework and no shading. The photograph is taken in warm, low lighting against a dark red background, with the feet filling most of the frame.

Ankle Other Turtle Matching pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the urn's only just boiled and I've been on my feet since the minibus. You want the turtle story? Then you'll have it the way Mrs Tremayne told it to me, because she was there and I was only the girl holding the torch.

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Summer of 1979, Penmerrin cove, the tide out past the rocks. Nell Carew and Ruth Pascoe found a sea turtle half buried in the wet sand, its flippers going like someone trying to climb a wall. They dug it out with their hands. Ruth wanted to take it home in a bucket. Nell said a turtle in a bucket stopped being a turtle, and she made Ruth promise to see it into the water. They carried it down the shingle between them, one at each end of a bath towel, and watched it slide under the first wave as if it had just remembered where it was going.

That same evening they bought a pen from the post office and drew little turtles on each other's ankles, lumpy things with stumpy legs, and swore the mark meant you carried the other one when the going got heavy. Then Nell went off to Leeds to train as a nurse, and Ruth stayed behind to mind her mother's shop on the harbour front. For thirty years the only thing they shared was a postcard each Christmas with a turtle doodled in the corner, sometimes with a crooked hat, once with a tiny umbrella.

At the reunion last spring, Ruth rolled up her trouser leg in the car park without a word, and Nell laughed so hard she had to sit down on a bollard. I'll not say what they talked about after that. They're in the corner by the raffle table now, and I'd bet the urn they're still arguing about which of them carried the other one home.