Colour tattoo of a sea turtle in blue, teal, pink and purple with a watercolour effect, on the side of the ribs below a coral crop top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour sea turtle on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle swims diagonally across the side of the ribcage, shown in side profile with its flippers spread. The shell and body use soft, blended washes of blue, teal, pink and purple, with darker linework defining the scales and flipper edges. The turtle fills the lower centre of the frame, with a coral crop top covering the upper part of the torso.

Ribs Sea turtle Turtle

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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

Come closer, the lift's broken again, so we'll climb and I'll tell it as we go. Eleven floors. My gran told me this one on the fourth landing of Harbour Court, swearing on her teeth that it was true. She had the sea in her voice, so I believed her.

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There was a green turtle called Mrs Teal who had swum all the way from the warm shallows off Cornwall, which is a long way for a turtle and a longer way for a flat. Her shell was worn to the colour of wet slate, and she talked to the gulls on the balconies in a dialect nobody else could follow. The gulls always looked pleased with what she said, mind, so nobody argued.

Then one February the rain didn't stop for nine days. Water came up through the bin chute, through the laundry room and the pram store, and it climbed the stairs one step at a time, pink and blue with the reflection of the chippy sign below. Mrs Teal swam up past the postboxes with her flippers spread wide, as if she were carrying the whole block on her back. On the seventh floor she found old Mr Adeyemi sitting on his top step with a tin of crusts for the gulls, and she nudged the tin gently out of his hands and kept nudging until he stood up and followed her down to the lobby, where the boats were waiting.

When the water went down, a wash of blue and rose was left on the wall of the seventh floor landing, shaped exactly like a turtle with its flippers out. The council painted over everything else that spring. They couldn't get that one off, and I've stopped trying. Mind your step past it, love. She still comes up to check on us.