Black and white stencil style drawing of the Pokémon Squirtle with a solid black shell, swirled tail and floating bubbles, shown as a design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Squirtle line art design in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows the cartoon turtle Pokémon Squirtle in profile, facing left, with a large open-mouthed expression and a tightly curled tail. The shell and tail are filled with solid black areas, while the face, limbs and outline are defined with bold, clean contour lines. Three small black bubbles float around the figure on a plain white background.

Blackwork Pokemon Turtle Bubble Tail Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick where the flour's been spilt, and don't you dare touch that tin until I say so. Right. Where was I? Ah, the turtle. The one that came up out of the canal behind Ashby's bakery the winter the big oven cracked, with a tail curled tight as a fern and three bubbles bobbing round its head as if it had brought its own weather.

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Nell Ashby was up at four every morning, same as me, and the turtle took to sitting on the sack beside her bench. It never ate a crumb of bread. It blew bubbles at the proving dough, one small silver ball at a time, and the dough rose the way it never had for her mother. Folk said the bubbles held a breath of rain. Nell said they held nothing but nonsense, but she left the shutter open so he could watch the sky go grey over the rooftops.

Then came the hard frost, the river locked to the sill, and the yeast jar that had been kept alive since her grandmother's day went green and dead overnight. The turtle slid off his sack without a word. Nell heard the splash through the ice-hole at the end of the yard and stood there with her floury hands raised, waiting. He came up near dawn with the old jar wedged in his shell and his tail wrapped round it twice, bubbles spiralling ahead of him like lamps.

They fed that starter for thirty years and it never once went flat. The turtle is gone now, though the shutter still stays open in winter. Nell's grandson swears that on the coldest mornings three small bubbles drift up past the window and pop above the sign, and the first loaf of the day always rises a little higher than the rest.