Collage of three tattoos reading Ohana in black script, with green sea turtles, a blue Stitch character and a pink plumeria flower.

Ohana tattoos with turtles, Stitch and plumeria

Lettering · Chest · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows three photographs of the word Ohana written in black cursive script, each paired with a different colourful motif: green sea turtles, a blue cartoon Stitch character and a pink and yellow plumeria flower. The script has smooth black linework, while the motifs use solid colour fills with soft shading. The panels are close crops of skin, with the Stitch tattoo shown in the upper right panel alongside a hand at the top edge.

Lettering Chest Ohana Script Sea turtle Stitch Plumeria Flower

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

The rain had come in sideways over the car park at Kirkgate, and I'd been wrestling a tarpaulin over the table of plastic leis for an hour when Dani Okada turned up with her nephew, soaked to the knees and furious about it. "Ohana means family," she said, shaking water off a canvas bag. "Nobody gets left behind, Auntie says. So why are we leaving the flowers?"

Keep reading

The boy, Tomas, had a blue toy creature clutched under his jacket, its ears poking out like a wet bat. He wanted a garland, so I gave him the yellow and pink ones, because my grandmother once told me plumeria should be worn close to the heart and never thrown away in the rain. Dani bought four. She paid in coins from a jam jar and counted them twice, as if the market might be cheating her.

Tomas asked where the turtles were. I told him turtles return to the beach where they hatched, which is the only navigation I trust. My grandfather carved them in koa wood for every child born on our street in Hilo, and he always said a turtle never swims alone for long, because the others come looking. Tomas nodded as if that settled a debt.

When the rain thinned, the boy tucked the creature into his hood and announced, very seriously, that he was taking it to his cousin in hospital, who needed something to hold onto. Dani didn't look at me. She just zipped the bag and walked off into the grey, the flowers bobbing at her wrist. I packed the leftover leis into a box, and under the tarp the damp wood of the table smelled faintly of salt, like a sea a long way off.