Small colour tattoo of a turtle with brown shell segments and three pink hearts in the centre, on the side of the ribs.

Turtle with pink hearts on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small turtle design made from brown shell segments with dark outlines, with three pink hearts stacked in the centre to form the body. The fills are smooth and the linework is bold and even, with soft shading inside the shell pieces. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, photographed indoors against a lace top and a floral skirt.

Ribs Turtle Heart Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had been out three days when I found Mother Iseult sitting on the slipway at Calder Reach, a hand's width of shell cracked clean across her back. She was not crying. Turtles of the Saltmere court do not cry, the royal almanac says so, and she had read it to me herself when I was small. She only watched the gulls work the wrack line and told me to fetch the mending pitch.

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The pitch was kept in the lamp-house, beside the ledger where every hatchling of the kingdom was written down. I had cleaned that ledger for two winters. I knew the name of every turtle born under the Duke of Tarn's seawall, and which of them had gone past the reef and never come back. Three of Mother Iseult's own were in that book, each name marked with a heart in the margin, because the old custom says a turtle carries her children in her shell and the hearts are where she keeps them.

When I returned she had already prised the broken plates free and laid them out on the stone, dark as wet bark. She set the first back with her flipper and pressed until it held. 'Some pieces are for keeping,' she said, 'and some are for giving.' Then she opened her small chest and took out three hearts of coral, pink as the inside of a whelk, wrapped in kelp. She fixed them one by one to the centre of her back, the largest first, while the sea came up over the slipway to meet her.

She pressed the smallest into my palm, still warm from the sun, and asked me to write in the ledger that the last heart had gone to the lighthouse girl. I wrote it. The ink dried slowly in the damp, and when I looked up Mother Iseult was already a dark shape past the reef, three pink lights glowing steady on her back.