Black and white flash sheet of Polynesian-style tattoo motifs, including a turtle, dolphins, a whale tail, a lizard, a fishhook and a sun, each with a printed label and meaning.

Polynesian motif flash sheet with labelled designs

Black and grey · Flash

A labelled black line drawing sheet arranged as a circle of Polynesian-style motifs, with a sun at the top, a turtle at the lower edge and a whale tail on the right. The linework is bold and solid with patterned bands and fills, and there is no colour, only black ink on white. Each motif has a caption in orange and grey text describing its name and meaning.

Sun Turtle Dolphin Lizard Flower Wave Circle Sand Feather Spiral

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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

Sit nearer the stove, lads, the kettle's only just stopped grumbling. You want the tale of the fishhook, do you? Then mind the tin cups. My uncle Tepu cooked on the Mahina Rose for eleven years, in a galley no wider than a coffin lid, and he swore the whole ship ran on the turtle that swam beneath it.

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Off the reef there was a green turtle as broad as a hatch cover, and every dawn she came up through the pale shallows over the sand, lifted her head, and pointed the way home. The old hands called her the navigator. Tepu never believed a word of it until the storm took the compass and the sky turned the colour of an unwashed pan. Then the sea birds wheeled and dropped towards the west. Birds only fly towards land, he said, so follow the birds. Dolphins ran alongside the bow like sentries, and a whale's tail rose and slapped the water twice, which meant the channel was clear.

Somewhere past the third night the carved shell fishhook nailed above the stove began to hum. Tepu fried the last of the flour on the drum-skin lid of the pot, and it rang like a struck bell. The crew laughed at him. Then the turtle surfaced grey in the swell, and a spear of morning light fell across her shell like gold thread through a weave of dark cloth.

We made harbour on the fourth morning, a thread of smoke above the roofs. Tepu never took a coin for the turtle's guidance and never said who taught him the knot in his line. He only pressed a curl of that old shell into my palm, warm as bread, and said you cannot count what the sea gives back. Then he put the kettle on again.