Three green sea turtles swimming in a diagonal line with small bubbles, tattooed on the ankle and foot.

Three sea turtles on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

Three small sea turtles, each with a grey-green shell and yellow-green flippers, are arranged in a diagonal line up the ankle. Dark outlines define the shells and flippers, and small grey bubbles sit between them. The colour is soft and the composition is simple, with the turtles set against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the wall, then, and mind the gull, he's been eyeing your crisps since you came down the steps. Right. Listen. Before the lighthouse was painted, the sea sent its turtles up Porthkennack beach every summer, and the sand had a border on it just like any country. Dune grass on one side, the tide on the other, and the crossing point was the wrack line, where the weed lay like a customs table nobody had bothered to staff.

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Three of them came out one night in August, no bigger than the buttons on Ada Penrose's cardigan. Their shells were grey like wet slate and their flippers were the green of new bracken. They had no papers, and nobody asked for any. The gulls stood about in a line, watching them the way Mr Pascoe used to watch parcels at the post office, and one by one the little things scrabbled past them down the slope towards the water.

The first two went under the foam as though it were a door they had been expected at. The third one stopped. It was the smallest, and it turned about on the sand to look back up the beach, at the dunes and the lamps of the village and the old woman sitting on her step with a torch she wasn't using. Then it blew three little bubbles, one, two, three, and went on down into the sea after its sisters.

I've seen bubbles like that every summer since, and I always count them. Three. That's how you know a crossing's been made properly.

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