Small coloured tortoise tattoo with black outlines on the lower leg, above the ankle.

Tortoise tattoo on lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

A small tortoise in profile faces right, with a domed brown shell marked by segmented scutes and a tan head and legs. The linework is dark and outlined, with soft brown and tan shading across the shell and a faint reddish shadow beneath. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale, freckled lower leg against a white background.

Calf Turtle Shell Reptile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, lad, you'll not catch a word over this rain drumming on the tarpaulins. Saturday at Gull's Wharf market, and the wind coming off the estuary sideways, the way it does before the tide turns. Old Ambrose Tull had his trestle wedged between the fishmonger and the man who sold paraffin, and on it, beside the brass scales, sat the one thing he would never sell.

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A tortoise, brown as a wet conker, shell gone the colour of strong tea, head turned to the right as though someone far down the aisle had called her name. Her name was Mrs Pardoe, and she had arrived four winters back in a shoebox carried by a girl called Nessa Rowe, who was sixteen, soaked through, and wanted nothing but bus fare. Nessa set the box down on the wet boards, pressed a sixpence into Ambrose's palm, and walked off into the crowd without a backward glance. The tortoise, given the freedom of the stall, simply set off on her own slow errand between the cabbages and the crates.

Nessa came back the next market day, and the one after, and every Saturday since, always standing by the paraffin man while Mrs Pardoe made her circuit of the stalls. Ambrose asked her once why she didn't take the creature home. She said her mum had a rule about pets that didn't need feeding by hand, then laughed at herself and wiped the rain off her face with her sleeve. I never asked her which of the two of them had been running away.

Last month the girl stopped coming. Ambrose has kept the trestle, though, and every morning he lifts the tortoise out of her box and sets her down by the scales. She walks her slow length of the market, past the fish and the paraffin, and when she reaches the end she turns round and starts again. Give her time, lad. She has never once been in a hurry, and the rain has never once put her off.