Traditional style turtle tattoo with a dotwork mandala shell in teal and blue, placed on the centre of the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Turtle with mandala shell on chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A sea turtle viewed from above, with its shell filled by a large lotus-like mandala with stippled dotwork petals and a teal centre. The flippers and head are outlined in black and shaded in teal and blue, with dotted patterns on the flippers and a spiral marking on the head. Bold black outlines and saturated teal and blue ink contrast with the lighter dotted greys, and the design is centred on the chest.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lantern, it's Mrs Okonedo's and she'll have my ears if it gutters. Right. Where was I? The turtle. Aye, the one who swam out past the last buoy off Penhallow with a flower growing on her back, and nobody on the quay could tell you which of them had planted it.

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She had a shell like a lotus pond seen from a boat, the petals stippled so fine you'd think a sailmaker had pricked them with a needle, grey and silver, with a green eye in the middle where the water went deep. The fishermen's children swore she could read the tides from it. Her head had a little whorl on it, like the curl at the end of a rope, and that's how the boy Tobiah knew she was listening when he sang to her from the jetty.

Tobiah was twelve and had no sense, so when the Marguerite broke her mooring in the squall he went after her in a rowing dinghy. The sea took him three days east. On the fourth morning the turtle came up under the bow, slow as a funeral, and waited. He held on to her shell. She swam him home by the stars she carried in those dots, and when they reached the harbour mouth she sank back under without a sound, leaving a single petal of foam on the water.

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