Traditional style colour tattoo of a sea turtle with a black-outlined star burst on its shell, placed on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Turtle with star burst shell on lower back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle is shown from above, with flippers spread and head turned to the right, filling most of the frame. The shell carries a central eight-point star burst with a small dark core and radiating black spikes, and the flippers and head are detailed with dotted and hatched shading. Bold black outlines define the design, with ochre, amber and brown tones on a pale skin background, and the white edge of a garment appears at the bottom of the frame.

Traditional Back Turtle Sea turtle Star Shell Flipper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Crane was the only one of us who could read a chart, so when Mr Hollis took the Year Eleven geography trip to the north Cornish coast in 1998, he handed her the brass compass and told her to keep us from walking off the cliffs. She kept it in the pocket of her cagoule and swore it was lucky. By the second morning the rest of us had stopped rolling our eyes and started following her along the sand.

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We found the turtle at low tide, flipped onto its back above the wrack line, flippers working at nothing. Dot knelt beside it, opened the compass, and let the needle settle against the sea. 'Out there,' she said. We carried it down between us, and it slid under the first green wave as if it had only been waiting for permission. Nobody believed her when she said they navigate by the magnetic field. She said it again in the minibus, louder, until Hollis told her to sit down.

The reunion was in the function room of the Sandbach Rovers, which smelled of warm sausage rolls and fabric conditioner. Dot found me by the raffle table. She had a grey bob now and a cardigan with a cat on it, and she laughed at my tie. She pressed a paper napkin into my hand. On it she had drawn the compass rose from memory, eight points and a dark dot at the centre, with a line underneath: you still owe me a turtle.

I folded the napkin into my wallet, behind a photo of a dog I no longer own, and went back to the raffle. Somebody had won the hamper I'd bought for my mum. Across the room, Dot was tapping the edge of her glass with a teaspoon, calling the old register, and for once nobody was walking off anywhere.