Black and grey shaded sea turtle with pink flowers tattooed on the top of a foot, near the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle and pink flowers on a foot

Other · Mixed · Photo

A sea turtle is shown in black and grey shading, seen from above with its shell detailed in darker tones and lighter highlights. Two pink flowers with dark outlines sit beside and below the turtle, adding the only colour to the design. The tattoo covers the top of a bare foot, with the turtle placed centrally and the flowers framing its lower and right sides.

Other Sea turtle Turtle Flower Pink flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie, the galley on the Harriet Lowe has finally stopped smelling of bleach, which is more than I can say for my hands. You asked whether the rumours about the turtle were true, so here is the plain version, since I know you'll tell Mum everything anyway.

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We were tied up at Port Ysabel three weeks back, waiting on a cargo of tinned peaches that never came. Ruth from the bosun's stores found the turtle in the drainage channel behind the warehouse, a loggerhead the size of a serving tray, its shell gone grey with barnacles, stuck in the silt and too tired to pull itself out. Somebody had cut a bloom off the pink oleander by the gate and it had landed on the mud beside her, so Ruth tucked it under the edge of the shell like a bookmark and said that was the only proper way to carry a thing home.

We kept her in a bucket of sea water on the galley step for two nights. I fed her lettuce ends and cold rice and she stared at me with an enormous patience, the way my father used to look at the wireless when it lied. On the third morning the tide turned and Captain Okafor, who has never once in six years done anything sentimental, carried the bucket down the gangway himself and tipped her in at the slipway. She didn't look back. Turtles don't, I'm told. They just swim.

The flower was still in the bucket, floating in a pale pink ring. I fished it out and pressed it between the pages of the hymnal in my cabin, and I'll post it to you when we dock at Falmouth, so you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the trouble.

Love, Pearl