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Motif · motif_shellback_turtle

Shellback Turtle

A turtle drawn as a naval service mark. Inherited as a bare label from the theme corpus and resolved here against the National Maritime Museum, which lists it among the tattoos that record where a sailor has been. Its meaning is a statement of fact about the wearer, not a metaphor.
Thin
Medium confidenceresearched

1 attested · 2 promoted1 source · T1

What the research says

motifs_seed
Category
animal
Common styles
american traditional
Common themes
maritime

Provenance

1 resolved

  • Facts about tattoos (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    Royal Museums Greenwich

    National Maritime Museum page. Verbatim: the word 'tattoo' is "derived from the Tahitian word 'tatau', meaning to mark"; a pig and a rooster tattooed on the feet were "said to protect a seaman from drowning"; a full-rigged ship, an anchor, a dragon and a shellback turtle each record a specific voyage or crossing. Establishes protective (apotropaic) intent inside the tattoo domain.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

Related concepts

3 links

Associated with · 1

  • → outgoingMaritimeThemeThin
    strength 0.75promoted · not an independent attestationresearched

    Promoted from motifs_seed.common_themes of motif_shellback_turtle ('maritime'); themes_seed.common_motifs of theme_maritime ('shellback turtle'). Asserted independently from both ends of the relation; deduped to one edge. Confidence is the LOWER of the contributing rows, not the higher. Provenance inherited from the parent row(s): source_rmg_tattoo_facts; source_rmg_tattoos_in_europe; source_historic_dockyard_tattoos; the first is carried in source_id. No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus. STRENGTH 0.75 set by the T11.11c rule: this pairing is asserted by TWO parent rows, one from each endpoint's own association column; the pack's scale reads 0.75 as 'frequent'. Inputs are corpus counts only - no source count, tier or confidence is used.

Can symbolize · 1

  • → outgoingEquator CrossingSymbolThin
    strength 1.00researched

    National Maritime Museum, verbatim: "A shellback turtle shows the sailor has crossed the Equator". A record-of-service meaning: it asserts something true about the wearer rather than an abstract quality, which is why its strength is 1.0 where interpretive edges in this batch sit at 0.5.

Frequently used in · 1

  • → outgoingAmerican TraditionalStyleThin
    strength 0.50promoted · not an independent attestationresearched

    Promoted from motifs_seed.common_styles of motif_shellback_turtle ('american traditional'). No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus. STRENGTH 0.5 set by the T11.11c rule: this pairing is asserted by ONE parent row's association column and by no second row; the pack's scale reads 0.5 as 'context-dependent'. Inputs are corpus counts only - no source count, tier or confidence is used.