Colour tattoo of a sea turtle with swirled flippers, a blue wave and an orange and pink flower, with dark teal outlines, on skin.

Sea turtle with wave and flower

Mixed · Photo

A sea turtle is outlined in dark teal, with spiral swirls on the flippers and head and small dots along the edges of the shell. Inside the shell, a blue wave curls beneath an orange and pink flower with pale petal highlights. The linework is bold and even, and the colour is applied with soft shading on a plain background of skin.

Sea turtle Turtle Wave Flower Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ask your grandfather about the turtle that came up the slipway in March, and he'll swear it was a rock. He's wrong. I held the lantern while Jory Penhale knelt over it, and it breathed like a bellows left out in the rain. Its shell was dark as wet slate, pricked round the rim with small holes where the barnacles had given up. Its flippers curled at the ends like the fern heads up on Carn Lowen, and Jory said that was how you knew it had travelled a long way.

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The trouble was the wave. Someone had worked a wave into its belly, blue and patient, curling right down into the shell. Caught inside the curl was a flower, orange at the tip and pink where the sun had reached it, its petals pale at the edges as if lit from within. Nobody on the quay could say where it came from. Mrs Tregear swore it was a plumeria she'd seen in a catalogue, and Mr Vosper said it was off a wreck, and they argued until the tide turned.

Jory wanted to take the turtle past the harbour wall and let it go where it belonged. I said the wave would drown it. He said the wave was the reason it had come. That was when I understood that a thing can carry its weather with it, the way a boat keeps the smell of tar even on dry land. We took it out on the ebb, Jory in the bow with his hand flat on the shell, and I watched the flower sink under the swell and rise again, blue and gold, before the dark took it.

The next morning there was a single orange petal on the slipway, dry as paper, and nothing else. My grandson keeps it in a jar on the windowsill. He says the turtle kept the rest. I let him think so.