Small black and grey turtle tattoo with tribal-style swirled flippers and a four-petal shell pattern, on the inner wrist of a raised hand.

Small turtle tattoo on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small turtle is tattooed on the inner wrist, seen from above with its head at the top and swirled flippers and tail. The outline is solid black with curling tribal-style lines, and the shell has a four-petal pattern with grey shading inside each petal. The design sits centrally on the wrist against a plain background of blue denim and a dark leather chair.

Forearm Turtle Swirl Shell Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea turtle came up the slipway at Porthkerris every summer the year the lighthouse keeper's daughter turned nine, and every summer the boatmen said she was a bad omen and should be sent back out. Nobody could agree on what kind of omen. Old Tamsin Rowe said she was a sign the herring would return. The vicar said she was a stray from warmer water and should be pitied. Ellis Penhale, who mended nets and had no patience for either, said she was just hungry.

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The girl, Morwenna, went down to the rocks at low tide with a bucket of mackerel heads and sat until the creature lifted its head out of the shallows. Its shell was marked with four petals, grey where the light had worn the paint away, and its flippers curled at the tips like fern shoots in spring. Morwenna talked to it about her mother, who had gone across the water for work and not written since Lent. The turtle listened the way the gulls did, with one eye and no promises.

In October a storm tore the nets loose from the quay, and Ellis went out in the rain to save them. His boat broke its mooring and went onto the Gull Stones. He was lying in the shallows when the tide turned, and it was the girl who saw the shell rising beside him, pushing him toward the sand. By morning the turtle was gone, and so was the rope that had been wrapped round Ellis's ankle. Nobody argued about omens after that. Morwenna kept a single grey petal scratched into the wood of her window frame, and when the herring came back the following year she was the only one on the quay who was not surprised.