Black line tattoo of a sea turtle with a world map shell and dotted flippers on the top of a foot, in a dotwork style.

Sea turtle with world map shell on foot

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A sea turtle is drawn in black ink on the top of a bare foot, with its shell filled by an outline map of continents. The outline of the shell and body is a clean, single black line, while the head and flippers are shaded with small stippled dots. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits centrally on the foot against a plain white background.

Dotwork Other Sea turtle Turtle World map Globe Continent Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtle had been swimming the wrong way for three days when Harold Quick finally put down his dividers and admitted it might know something he didn't. It came up in the mackerel net off Mousehole, a broad green thing with a shell the colour of wet slate, and when the crew tipped it onto the deck the lines on its back caught the lamplight like old ink.

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Harold had spent forty years drawing coasts for the Admiralty, and he knew a coastline when he saw one. These were not quite right. The Africa was too round, the bite of the Gulf sat in the wrong place, and there was a long island where the Atlantic ought to be open water. 'It's been sailing,' said his granddaughter Mae, who was nine and certain of most things. 'It's keeping a record.'

They argued about it over tea until the kettle boiled dry. Harold wanted to copy the shell onto vellum before the creature's head went back under. Mae wanted to know which places it had been and whether they had turtles there too. In the end they took the stippled flippers as a kind of legend, the dots marking where the animal had rested, and Harold drew the shell faithfully, dot for dot, the way his own father had taught him to draw a harbour.

At dawn they carried it down the slipway and set it in the shallows. It paddled once, twice, then turned its blunt head towards the open water as if taking a bearing. Mae kept the vellum. Harold kept the pencil. Neither of them ever found the island that was not on any chart, though Mae still says that in winter the sea seems to ask her a question every time she passes the harbour wall.