Colour tattoo of a sea turtle with an orange hibiscus flower on the lower torso, in a bold neo-traditional style with dark outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle and hibiscus on the lower torso

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle with teal and dark blue shell and flipper patterning swims over a large orange hibiscus flower with a pink centre, stamen and green pistil. The linework is bold and dark, with shading on the petals and shell that gives the design depth. The design sits on pale skin across the lower torso, with grey fabric visible along the bottom edge of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Other Sea turtle Turtle Hibiscus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mae, Papa's boat came in on Tuesday with a green turtle lashed to the stern, still alive and furious, its flippers going like oars against the planks. Hank wanted to sell it to the hotel on the point, but I told him the hotel had a cook already and a turtle deserves better than a soup pot. We let it go off the jetty at dusk, and it paddled out past the buoys without a backward look, which is more than I can say for the Fenwick boy who has been mooning after me since Easter.

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You'll laugh, but I've been thinking about that turtle every night since. The hibiscus by the post office dropped a whole bloom on the step this morning, orange as a traffic lamp with a red throat like it had been bitten. I pressed it between the pages of Mama's hymnal, the way she used to, and then I went and stood at the water like a fool.

Ruth says a sea turtle comes back to the beach where it was hatched, that it can find the exact sand after twenty years at sea. I don't believe her. But I thought about it all afternoon, and I thought about Papa's face when he said he'd hauled the thing up by accident, and I suppose I wondered whether anything that long away ever really leaves the place it started.

Write soon and tell me the Leeds weather is as grey as you say. Here the sea has been the colour of a bottle all week, and I have stopped minding. Your loving sister, Edie.

P.S. Don't tell Mama about the hymnal.