Colourful watercolour-style sea turtle tattoo in pink, yellow, green and blue with fine black linework and a small fish, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour sea turtle with a small fish

Other · Colour · Photo

A sea turtle is shown in profile with a shell of pink, yellow and green washes, and its flippers and head are drawn with loose black sketch lines. A small orange and white fish and splashes of blue, pink and green sit around the turtle on pale skin. The soft, bleeding colour and open composition give the piece a painted, watercolour look.

Other Sea turtle Turtle Fish Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shake your umbrellas before you come under the awning, the lot of you, or you'll drip on the fish. Yes, the sea. Hold still and I'll tell you how Ada Pell's paint box went over the harbour wall the wet week before the fair, and how the turtle came out of it.

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Ada sold postcards at the Tuesday market, painted skies and gulls and the odd lighthouse, and that autumn every sky she made ran straight off the card and into the gutter. Her pots of rose madder and lemon yellow rolled down Fishgate Lane in a downpour and burst in a puddle by the bins. The next morning a sea turtle lay in that puddle, shell still blushing pink where the rain had blurred it, a flick of green at its flippers. It shook itself and slid off down the gutter toward the water, and a little orange fish with a white stripe went nipping after it like a dog after a cart.

The turtle came back every morning after that. It left bright smudges on the cobbles and once, so the fishmonger's boy swore on his mother, it took a scallop straight out of his bucket and left a blue thumbprint behind. Ada followed it to the wall one grey dawn and found her brushes lying on the stones, bristles still wet with green. She dipped them, painted the flippers in long loose strokes, and let the water do the rest.

When the rain finally stopped, the slabs in Fishgate Lane still held a faint shell of colour, and nobody swept it away. The sea was too grey to show it, but the children at the bus stop could see it plain as day, and that is why, if you look hard at the harbour wall on a wet Tuesday, you will see a turtle or two going about its business, bleeding a little at the edges.