Black and grey blackwork back tattoo of a turtle shell with a turtle head, tribal patterns and two reptilian eyes across the lower back.

Turtle shell and tribal back piece

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A full back piece shows a large turtle shell filling the centre of the back, with its head at the upper left shoulder. Bold solid black fills, outlined grey scales and tribal-style bands and spirals frame the design, and two stylised reptilian eyes sit above the waistband. The image is composed straight on against a dark background, with the tattoo covering almost all of the visible skin.

Blackwork Back Turtle Shell Tribal pattern Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had left the reef flat cracked and steaming when Ines found the turtle wedged between two coral heads, its shell as broad as a kitchen table. She knelt on the wet rock and counted the scutes the way her mother had taught her, one hexagon at a time, until the pattern stopped being a shell and became a map she half remembered. Someone had cut the old fishing line from its hind leg. Someone had been there before her.

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Along the beach the boats were coming in low with the catch, and the men were already arguing about the weather. Nobody on Sela was supposed to touch a turtle that came up the shallows at dawn. Her uncle Dario said they carried the island on their backs, and that if you took one away a piece of the ground went with it. Ines had always thought that was the kind of thing old men said to keep children out of the water.

She pushed her hands under the shell and felt the heat of the sun held in it, the grit of barnacles, the slow pulse of something enormous deciding whether to trust her. Two gold-ringed eyes watched from the shadow of the mangroves, though she could not tell whether they belonged to the animal or to the island itself. When the turtle lifted its head, its beak was grey and tired, and it looked past her at the swell rolling over the reef.

She did not carry it. She dragged it on a sheet of tarpaulin, inch by inch, past the boats and the shouting, until the first wave lifted it free. The shell turned once in the green water, slow as a thought, and then it was gone beneath the reef. Dario found her on the slipway, palms raw and salt-white. "It will want paying back," he said. "Everything out there does," she answered, and kept her eyes on the water where the shell had gone.