Black tribal-style swirl tattoo with a small turtle across a person's upper back, shown in a sepia photograph.

Tribal swirl and turtle tattoo on back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sepia photograph of a bare upper back showing a black tribal-style tattoo of long curling swirls that run from the shoulder down along the spine. A small turtle sits within the upper swirl, and the lines are filled with smaller scrolls and dotted detail. The ink is solid black and the composition is centred on the back with the head cropped out of frame.

Back Turtle Swirl Spiral Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The turtle came up the slipway on the last spring tide of October, shell crusted with weed, and nobody in Gullhaven could agree whether it had swum in or been carried. Maud Teague, who had mended nets on that quay for forty years, said it had come looking for her. The fish merchant's boy laughed into his sleeve and was sent off with a clip round the ear and a basket of mackerel to deliver.

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Maud kept a bone needle and a tin of tar-black thread in her apron pocket, and for three nights she sat by the stove working the cords into long curling scrolls, the way her mother had shown her, one loop feeding into the next until they ran like a current. The turtle lay in a bucket of seawater behind the stove, lifting its head at the tick of the clock. On the third night she cut the last knot and found she had stitched a spiral around the creature's back, a ring of little dots like rain falling on a pond.

"Put it back where it belongs," she told her nephew at dawn, when he came to fetch the bucket. He argued that the sea was miles off and the creature would die in the shallows, but she only pointed at the tide-line, where the water had already crept up the stones. He carried it down carefully, the way you'd carry a sleeping child, and watched it paddle out past the breakwater, trailing the frayed cord she had tied to its shell.

That winter the herring came back to the bay for the first time in nine years, and the boats came in heavy. Maud never said a word about it, though the boy swore he saw a dark twist of line in the water beside the quay every morning, keeping pace with the lobster pots as they went out and came home again. Nobody mended a net better after that, and nobody ever again asked Maud Teague where the turtle had come from.