Black and grey Polynesian-style tribal tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm, centred on a sea turtle with a star compass motif.

Polynesian turtle tattoo on shoulder and upper arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm of a person whose face is not shown, with a sea turtle at its centre surrounding a star or compass design. Bold solid black fills sit behind the turtle and the star, while bands of triangular and chevron patterns and leaf-like forms wrap around the arm. The image is black and grey on a dark background, with clear, well-lit detail.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Turtle Star Compass Tribal pattern Chevron Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reef was still a day off when Tavita raised his hand and the boys stopped paddling. Nobody spoke. The sky had gone the colour of wet slate, and the stars that had carried them out from Manoa Iti were sliding behind cloud one by one. Only the turtle kept pace beside the hull, a broad brown back breaking the swell every few breaths, steady as a clock someone had forgotten to wind.

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His grandmother had taught him the star compass on the mat outside her house, scratching the points into the sand with a stick: thirty-two rising places, each with its own star and its own name for the wind that came up beneath it. She had also told him that the green turtle returns to the very beach where it was hatched. Follow a turtle, she said, and you will always be following the land. He had laughed at her then. Now he kept his eyes on the flat head rising and falling in the grey water.

Near dusk the turtle dived and did not come up where he expected. Tavita felt the canoe lift and shiver as the reef showed its teeth, white water breaking on coral he could not see. The boys shouted. He called them to silence and turned the bow toward the place where the animal had gone under, trusting it more than the sky. A gap opened in the surf the width of two paddles, and beyond it lay a lagoon the colour of jade.

They dragged the canoe onto the sand before the last light went. Tavita walked up the beach alone and found the furrow of a turtle that had come ashore in the night, leading straight to the grass. He knelt and pressed his palm into the sand beside it, then looked up at the first star, which sat exactly where his grandmother had said it would, and felt foolish for doubting the old woman's sea.