Dark brown dotwork tattoo of a turtle with a yin yang centre on the inner wrist, below a dark jacket sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Turtle and yin yang on the inner wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small turtle design sits on the inner wrist, with its shell filled by a yin yang symbol in dark brown ink. Fine dots and short strokes form the outline and the flippers, with a dotted border around the shell. The background is a soft, muted grey pavement and the photograph is taken from a slight angle with even daylight.

Dotwork Forearm Turtle Yin yang Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Cordwell House broke the same week the turtle came up out of the canal, so the children carried it up the stairs themselves. Everyone on the ninth floor called it the tortoise, though Mrs Okafor's boy insisted on turtle, as the sea ones were the proper sort. Its shell was split down the middle, one half scrubbed white, the other as black as wet slate, and each half held a small dot of the opposite colour like a breath kept in.

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Old Saoirse, who kept pigeons on the roof, said it had come from a tile lorry bound for Leeds and had got off at the wrong junction. It asked for nothing but a dish of rainwater each evening. In return it grew a new dot along the shell border whenever a family moved out, and it always knew which door had gone quiet before the removal van was booked. By spring the border ran all the way round, and the children began counting it like a rosary.

The council man arrived in June with a clipboard and a yellow hard hat. He stood in the car park looking up at the eleven floors as if they were a sum that would not add up. On the last evening the turtle went to the parapet. Its dots caught the light one by one, and the children swore the black half turned slowly to face the white, the way two people in a kitchen do when neither wants to speak first.

The block came down on a Tuesday. Afterwards, on the cleared ground, Mrs Okafor's boy found a single shell scute no bigger than a fingernail, still speckled with paint. He kept it in his pocket for years and never let anyone tell him it was only plastic, because one dot on it had never been pressed in by anybody leaving.