Black and grey botanical tattoo of hibiscus and plumeria flowers with two sea turtles across a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea turtles and flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo across the upper back of a woman whose head is turned away, with blonde hair and ear piercings visible. The design shows layered hibiscus and plumeria flowers in the centre, flanked by two sea turtles with solid outlines and simple shaded shells. The ink is grey and black, with soft shading in the petals and a plain, lightly blurred skin background.

Botanical Back Flower Hibiscus Plumeria Sea turtle Turtle Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtles came up the slipway on the spring tides, two of them, heads low like men reading the paper, and they walked the cobbles below Mrs Vaitua's gate as if someone had laid them out for their feet. Nobody in Porthgwidden knew where they came from. Mrs Vaitua said they came from somewhere a map would not admit to, and she kept a chipped enamel bowl of hibiscus petals on the back step for them.

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I was nine the summer the council sent letters. My mother ran the fish van and read every one aloud at supper in a voice that made the soup go cold. The harbour wall, the letters said, was to be 'regenerated'. Mrs Vaitua read hers standing in her doorway, folded it into a paper boat and set it on the water beside the slipway. 'Those men don't know tide tables,' she said. 'Turtles do. They'll stop coming when they're meant to stop, and not before.'

That autumn the machines came and laid a gravel bank where the slipway had been. For three tides the turtles lay in the lee of it with their necks stretched out, looking, and Mrs Vaitua walked down each morning with her bowl and a face like a shut door. I took the petals from her hands and tipped them onto the gravel, plumeria first because the turtles liked the thick ones, then the hibiscus. I did not believe it would work, but I did it anyway.

On the fourth morning the sea had pulled the gravel back into a long ridge, and both turtles were at the foot of the wall, pushing through wet petals towards the water. Mrs Vaitua did not clap. She just carried the empty bowl home and rinsed it, and I stood on the sand watching the tide spread the flowers across the stones, pink and cream and browning at the edges, until there was nothing left but the sea.