Colour traditional-style tattoo of a sea turtle with a red flower on its shell, shown on a person's limb against a light blue background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtle with red flower on a limb

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle swims diagonally across the skin, with a detailed head, scaled flippers and a shell patterned with a red flower and teal leaves. The outlines are bold and black, with soft shading on the shell plates and flippers. Bright orange, green, pink and blue ink dominate the composition, which is framed by a light blue fabric background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtle came up the slipway at midnight with a garden on its back, and Tomas the lamplighter set down his oil can to watch it. Nobody in Saltmarket had seen a sea turtle this far up the river. The gulls had gone quiet on the rooftops, and the gas lamps along the quay hummed the way they did before rain.

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It stopped beneath his lamp and looked at him with one bright eye. The flower on its shell was red as a fishwife's shawl, and the leaves beside it were the green of old copper. Tomas asked it what it wanted. The turtle said nothing, which was fair enough, since turtles seldom do, but it turned its head towards the old chandlery at the end of the quay, where the widow Ailsa Crane kept a window box of geraniums that had not flowered in three winters.

He carried the creature up the steps in both arms, its flippers paddling at the cold air. Ailsa was awake with a candle, as if she had been expecting someone. She took one look at the shell, set the candle down, and went out to the sea wall in her nightgown. The turtle slid from Tomas's arms and walked, slow and deliberate, to the edge of the tide. It vanished under the black water and left a single red petal pressed flat on the wet stone. By morning the geraniums were in bloom.

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