Black ink flash design of a sea turtle with swirling tribal patterns and a pale pink five-petalled flower on its shell, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle design with pink flower

Blackwork · Mixed · Flash

A stylised sea turtle drawn in black with swirls, dots and geometric patterns across the shell, head and flippers. A pale pink five-petalled flower sits at the centre of the shell, with a small diamond motif below it. The turtle is shown alone against a plain cream background, with no body part visible.

Blackwork Sea turtle Turtle Flower Plumeria Swirl Dot Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Tregarthen kept the flooded adit at the bottom of Wheal Lowen, and everyone in Porthgwidden said the sea came up through it on the nights the tide was full. Her son Jory went down the shaft that spring to fetch the pump rope and did not come up for two days. When the men lowered a lamp on the third morning, they saw no tunnel at all, only green water and a broad dark shape turning slowly beneath it.

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It was a turtle, as wide as a cartwheel, its shell worked over with black spirals like the scrollwork on a chapel pew. In the middle of the shell a pale pink flower lay open with five petals, and when the wind came down the shaft it gave off a sweetness that no one in the village had smelled before, like the blossom a sailor once brought home from past the Cape and left drying on the windowsill. The turtle lifted its head towards the rope. Its eyes were older than the mine.

Maud did not pull Jory up that day. She knelt on the wet stones and said she had heard the old stories, that the sea had been here before the tin, and that it kept a count of what was taken from it. The turtle opened its mouth and Jory came up the shaft on its back, coughing salt, with his boots full of pale petals.

Every spring after that, the village left one flower on the quay at the top of the tide. The water took it, and the pump at Wheal Lowen ran dry for another year.