Three black Polynesian-style sea turtle tattoo designs on a white background, one with a plumeria flower on its shell and one with a sunburst centre.

Three Polynesian sea turtle designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Three sea turtle designs drawn in solid black shapes are arranged down the left side of a white background. The top turtle has a plumeria flower on its shell surrounded by a chain of arrow-like motifs, the middle turtle has a leaf pattern with striped fills on its shell, and the smallest has a sunburst centre. The image is black ink only with no greys or colour, and the composition leaves much of the right side empty.

Blackwork Geometric Turtle Sea turtle Plumeria Flower Sunburst Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hull was still warm from the afternoon when Auntie Serai pressed the ash-stick into my palm and told me to draw the turtles the way the sea draws them, without lifting my hand. In the kingdom of Vaherau we did not keep maps. We painted the old turtles onto the bailing boards of every canoe, so that a navigator could glance down at the wood and know which reef lay beneath.

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I drew the big flowered one first, the plumeria at its crown, because that was the one that brought the fishing fleet home the year the storms took the lighthouse fires. Serai shook her head. She tapped the leaf-shelled turtle next, its stripes running like rain across a field, and said that one was for the rains we needed in the dry months. Then she touched the smallest, its shell a sunburst, the one she kept for herself.

On the night the sky went grey at its edges, I sat in the stern with the board across my knees and did not sleep. The stars were gone. I had only the wood under my fingers, the sunburst pressing its rays into my thumb, and I read it the way she had taught me: the spokes point to the place the swell comes from. I turned the tiller until the rays lay straight against the wind.

At dawn the reef broke white on our left and the lagoon opened like a cupped palm. Serai was waiting on the sand with her ash-stick. When I told her, she only smiled and said I had drawn the sun in the right place. I had not drawn anything. The sun had always been there under the shell, waiting for someone patient enough to look down.