Realistic colour tattoo of a sea turtle swimming over a teal wash, placed on the upper arm.

Sea turtle realism on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle swims diagonally across the skin, shown from above and slightly to one side, with its head turned towards the upper right. The shell and flippers have detailed scale and plate linework with soft shading that gives the reptile volume. Yellow, ochre and dark brown tones make up the turtle, set against a loose teal and green wash that suggests water behind it.

Realism Upper arm Sea turtle Turtle Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grandad Tommy painted the turtle on the wall of the pit baths the winter the cage stuck at four hundred feet. Nobody in Scaur Hill had asked him to. The men came up that week through the dark of the lamp room and found a green sea where the tiles had been cream for thirty years, with a reptile swimming across it, its head turned as if someone had called its name from the far side of the room.

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He had seen a real one as a lad, he told me, lifting its head out of a swell off a boat bound for somewhere warm, and it had looked back at him like it was checking the weather. He never got further than Whitley Bay after that. He went down the pit because his mother needed the wage, and he spent thirty-one years under the ground with the sea still in his head. When the colliery shut he took a trowel to the wall and scraped a little of the green away from the flippers, so the turtle looked as though it was still pushing forward.

The men argued about it for years. Someone said it was bad luck to paint a creature that couldn't breathe down there. Grandad said the opposite, that a thing which could hold its breath for hours on the sea bed was exactly what a miner ought to be looking at. I thought he was being soft until my first shift, when I stepped out of the baths corridor with my tin hat in my hand and stood still in front of that wall until the foreman shouted.

When they knocked the baths down last spring, the wall came apart in slabs. I found the turtle's head face up in the rubble, its eye still turned towards the sea. I kept it. It sits on my windowsill now, a square of plaster with the water still green around it.