Black and grey dotwork sea turtle tattoo swimming across the outer thigh, with stippled shading on the shell and flippers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle tattoo on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A sea turtle swims towards the right of the frame, drawn in black ink with a detailed shell, scaled head and flippers. The shell and skin pattern are built from fine stippled dots and shaded passages, giving a textured, realistic finish. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a pale upper thigh, with a dark skirt visible at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Realism Thigh Sea turtle Turtle Shell Flipper Ocean

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up heavy on the third haul, and Dad swore at it the way he swore at weather, until the thing inside lifted its head out of the mesh and he stopped swearing altogether. It was a sea turtle as big as a bread tray, its shell freckled with old barnacles, its flippers tangled in twine. Dad cut it free with the gutting knife, very carefully, and hauled it over the gunwale onto the boards of the Marigold like a sack of wet sand that had decided to breathe.

Keep reading

The aquarium man from Exeter came down to the harbour that week with a clipboard and a van. He offered forty pounds and a lift home for the turtle, and Dad said he would think on it, which in our house meant no. So it lived in the old fish tank in the scullery, where the water smelled of brine and Nell talked to it before school. She knocked on the glass with one knuckle, and by the second week it came up to meet her every time, its dark eyes steady, its scaly head turning to follow the sound.

In October the wind backed round to the east and the glass went down. Dad carried the tank himself, slopping water on his boots, down the slipway in the grey dawn. He tipped the turtle out into the shallows and stood there with the sea rising over his ankles while it sat, unmoving, as though weighing the choice. Then it paddled out past the breakwater light, its wake breaking into a scatter of small bright specks on the dark water, like the stippling on its own shell.

Nell waved until she couldn't see it any more. "It knows the way," she said. Dad put a hand on her head and didn't answer, and after a while he said, "It does now."