White sea turtle silhouette with a sand dollar inside its shell on a black background, shown as a design with no body placement.

Sea turtle with sand dollar design

Black and grey · Flash

A white sea turtle silhouette viewed from above, with flippers spread and a head at the top. Inside the shell outline sits a sand dollar with a five-petal pattern and small radiating marks, drawn as solid negative shapes. The bold graphic design is shown in flat black and white on a black background, with the subject centred and filling most of the frame.

Sea turtle Turtle Shell Flipper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the bucket down, Tomas, and stop poking that crab. It's not yours to take home. Sit on the wall where the wind comes off the bar and I'll tell you about the summer Mrs Penhallow's turtle came in on the spring tide.

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Nobody in Porthgarrow had seen a sea turtle that size. It came over the bar at dawn with its flippers spread like a pair of wet sails, and it sat in the shallows by the lifeboat slip as if it were waiting for a bus. Old Ruan Pascoe swore it had a sand dollar caught on its shell, the flat pale sort you only find after a storm, and he was right. It sat in the middle of the shell like a brooch, its five petals pointing the way the turtle meant to go.

Mrs Penhallow had buried her husband that winter and hadn't set foot on the sand since. She walked down in her good coat, knelt in the surf, and told the creature which way was out. Then she laid her hand flat on the shell, the way you'd settle a nervous horse, and the turtle slid through the gap in the breakers without once looking back.

The sand dollar was still lying in the wet sand where the shell had rested, so I picked it up and carried it up to her cottage. She set it on the windowsill, and it's there yet, with the light coming through its five little holes and the tide going out behind it.