Two small black turtle tattoos on the side of a torso, one with a solid patterned shell and one with a spiral shell.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small turtle tattoos on the side

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two small black turtle tattoos sit on bare skin, one above and to the left of the other. The upper turtle has a solid shell with a segmented pattern, while the lower one has a spiral shell and simple head and flippers. The image is in black ink only, with an orange fabric edge and a light leak across the right side of the frame.

Ribs Turtle Spiral Shell

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the bag under the trestle table twenty minutes before the vows, the one Auntie Ros swore she had handed to the vicar. Inside, wrapped in a tea towel that still smells of pipe smoke, are two carved turtles no longer than your thumb. Both came from the same grey plank of wreck timber that washed up at Polzeath the winter your grandfather was still going out in the boat.

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One has a shell scored into neat plates, like the courses of a dry-stone wall. The other has a spiral worked so tight into its back that you need your reading glasses to follow it to the middle. Ros had told you at the rehearsal dinner, over a second glass of rosé, that Gran meant them for Tamsin and Owen to carry down to the water after the speeches and let go where the sand turns dark. Nobody had mentioned that they were meant to be a pair, or that Owen had slipped the spiral one into his jacket pocket at lunch to stop it rattling against his cufflinks.

So you walk the cliff path with the wind pulling at your tie, past the gorse and the lifeguard hut shuttered for winter, and find the groom at the top of the slipway with his shoes in his hand. He looks at the turtle in your palm as though you have produced a letter from the dead. "She'd have liked that you kept them together," you say, and he laughs, and holds out his own.

Down on the sand the light is going copper and the guests are a row of dark shapes against the dunes. Tamsin arrives barefoot, holding up her skirt, and you press the plated turtle into her hand while Owen closes his fingers over the spiral one. The sea is coming in fast over the flats. They let go together. Both turtles bob once, pale against the wet sand, and then the tide takes them one after the other past the rocks.