Black and white Polynesian-style tribal design showing a sea turtle, fern fronds and bands of geometric pattern, drawn as a flash sheet with no body part visible.

Polynesian-style turtle and fern tribal design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white tribal design centres on a sea turtle with a patterned shell, surrounded by fern fronds, spirals and zigzag bands. The linework is solid black with white negative space, and hatching fills some of the smaller areas. The design is shown flat and filled edge to edge, with no skin or body part in view.

Turtle Fern Leaf Spiral Zigzag Tribal pattern Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea turtle came up the reef every spring when the breadfruit was splitting on the branch, and the old keeper of the lighthouse on Tiri Point said it had been doing so since before the light was built. He kept a tally on the wall of the lamp room, one notch for each return, and by the year Mere Fa'aoso came to him for work the notches ran nearly the length of his arm.

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Mere was seventeen and wanted to leave on the supply boat. She had a canvas bag packed with her mother's good scissors and a letter addressed to a cousin in Auckland. The keeper asked her to sit with him one night and watch the turtle come ashore below the tower. She sat. The turtle dragged itself up the sand, laid its eggs in a hole the size of a man's boot, and turned back toward the water with its shell glowing faintly under the lamp's sweep.

In the morning Mere tore up the letter and went up the tower to clean the glass. She found the keeper's tally had a new mark cut beside the old ones, deeper than the rest. Under it, in his careful hand, he had scratched a fern frond, and beside that a spiral that wound inward like a path going home. She stayed until the next lamp was lit, and the boat left without her.