Small dark blue-black tribal-style turtle tattoo with a spiral body on the upper back, below the nape of the neck.

Small tribal turtle tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small turtle design drawn in bold, dark ink sits on the upper back, centred below the nape of the neck. The shape is built from smooth, solid outlines with a spiral forming the body and tapering curls for the flippers and head. The skin is pale and the background is softly out of focus, with the design as the clear focal point.

Back Turtle Spiral Tribal Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tortoise was parked dead centre on the white line when my headlights found it, and I stood on the brake so hard the trailer chains sang. Sixty miles of nothing either side of the Sand Wells cutoff. I climbed down into air like an oven door and walked toward it, expecting it to bolt. It didn't. It turned its head slowly and looked at me as though I were the one who had wandered into its road.

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Its shell was the colour of old dishwater, and across the back of it someone, or something, had worn a pattern into the horn: a spiral at the centre, with curls tapering out to the edges like the ends of a fiddlehead. My grandmother kept a cedar box with that same shape carved into its lid, and she kept her unposted letters inside it. She used to say turtles carry their houses and their roads together, so they never have to choose which way to go.

I slid my hands under its shell, which was warm and heavier than any stone I'd lifted, and carried it across the verge to the shade of a creosote bush. It pulled its legs in and sulked. I left it there with the cap of my water bottle filled and set beside it, then went back to the cab, where the envelope was still on the passenger seat, three years of sorry I'd never sent. I took the pen from the dashboard, wrote her name across the front, and drove on with the windows down so the dust could get in.