Colour tattoo of sea turtles swimming over coral on an upper arm, with sunlight rays shining through blue water above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtles and coral on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large brown sea turtle in the foreground with a smiling green cartoon-style face, accompanied by two smaller turtles swimming above. Shell and scale detail is shaded with soft gradients, while the water is rendered in blues and teals with light rays. Orange, pink and red coral and seabed fill the lower part of the design, which wraps across the upper arm and shoulder.

Upper arm Sea turtle Turtle Coral Underwater Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The declaration form said one crate of dried shrimp, and the man in the orange waterproofs swore on his mother's grave that nothing else was inside. I lifted the lid anyway. Looking up at me from a bed of wet newspaper was a green sea turtle with the most pleased expression I have ever seen on a creature of any kind.

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He had a tag on one flipper, stamped with a reference number and the words RETURN TO SEA. The man, whose name was Teodor and who had been driving since Calais with the windows down, explained that the turtle had been rescued from a fishing net off the Portuguese coast, and that the rehabilitation centre had arranged for him to be released at a quiet reef near the Isle of Wight. The paperwork had gone missing somewhere over Spain. The turtle, Teodor said, had not been consulted and was not interested in paperwork.

I stamped the form. It seemed the least I could do. Somebody had to make the decision, and the turtle had already made his, lifting his head over the crate's rim to watch the gulls wheeling over the car park as if they were a show laid on for his benefit.

We carried him down the slipway together, Teodor at the back and me holding the front edge of the crate. At the waterline the turtle went quiet. Then he slid out, one flipper and then the next, and the Channel took him without a splash. For a moment he hung there in the green light, sunbeams breaking on his shell, looking back at us with that same wide grin, before he turned and swam out toward the sun on the water.