Colour tattoo of a green sea turtle with pink and red plumeria flowers and turquoise waves on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle and plumeria on upper back

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A green sea turtle swims towards the left, its shell shaded in grey-green tones and its flippers and head marked with dark outlines and spotted scale patterns. Three plumeria flowers in red and pink sit around the turtle, with turquoise wave swirls curling behind it and across the design. The tattoo fills most of the frame on smooth skin, with bold colour and soft blended shading.

Back Sea turtle Turtle Plumeria Flower Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtle came up beside the stern again this morning, just as I was tipping potato peel over the rail, and it looked at me the way the old bosun does when he thinks I've short-changed the rations. Green as a bottle, with that patterned skin like someone had dotted it with a fine brush. I told it to go and find its own breakfast. It stayed put, idling in the wake where the water turns blue as cornflower.

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Dear Ada, you asked in your last letter whether the galley is any better than the mess used to be. It is, mostly. Mr Kearns has taken the fat off the stew and I have the run of the stores now, which means the plumeria Captain Fenn bought off a barrow in Papeete is mine to keep in a jam jar by the stove. Two of them have already gone brown at the edges, but the third opened last night and the whole cramped space smelled like a summer I have not yet had.

The turtle has a name now. Tomas on the foredeck calls it Mrs Pell, after the landlady who never let him in without a shilling. I say it is a young male with no manners. Either way, it has followed us for three days, and when the wind dropped yesterday it rolled onto its back in the swell with its flippers spread, and the lads cheered as though it had done a trick for them.

I went to the rail with the last of the peelings and found I had nothing left to throw. Tell Mother I am eating properly. Tell her the turtle is still here. When we dock at Suva I will post you a pressed flower if the customs men allow it, and if they don't, you will have to take my word for the colour.