Black ink Polynesian-style tattoo of a sea turtle with a compass star and chevron border, wrapping the shoulder and upper arm.

Polynesian turtle tattoo on upper arm

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black ink tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, centred on a turtle outlined in bold linework with a compass star at its body. Bands of chevrons, sun-ray triangles and fern-like leaves frame the design. The image is greyscale-toned against a dark background, with solid black fills contrasting with the lighter skin.

Shoulder Upper arm Turtle Compass Star Chevron Leaves Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walt Penrose had been on Ward Nine for eleven days, and every night at about three he asked me whether the tide was making. There is no sea within forty miles of Ward Nine. I told him so on the first night and he looked at me the way my father used to look at a bad knot, then asked again the next night, and I stopped correcting him.

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On the twelfth night he woke me by tapping the bed rail with a biro. He had a chart folded in his locker, soft as cloth from handling, and he spread it across the tray table and pressed his thumb on a small inked island. Ascension, he said. Green turtles came up the beach there in the dark to lay their eggs, and they never once got lost, not in forty years of sailing past. He drew a compass star beside the island with his shaking hand, eight points, the centre filled solid, and said that was what they steered by, the star in their heads that nobody else could see.

I asked him why he'd never told me any of this. He said I'd never asked about anything but his blood pressure. Fair enough. His pressure was fine that night, his breathing steady, and he fell asleep with the chart rising and falling on his chest while I sat with the little brass compass from my locker in my palm, turning it until the needle settled on north.

At six the day shift came in with their loud coats and their coffee. I took the chart from the bed and folded it along its old creases, and I kept it in my pocket as I walked out past the car park, where the sun was just clearing the roofs of the bungalows, the colour of the inside of a shell. I didn't need the compass. I checked it anyway, and it pointed the way it always does.