Woman in a brown hat on a rocky shore, with a red and yellow bird tattoo on her thigh and a fine-line scroll tattoo on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird on thigh and scroll on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman wearing a brown felt hat and a white crochet bralette stands side on, with her face hidden by the hat and hair, on a rocky coastline by the sea. A colourful traditional-style bird design with red and yellow details sits on her upper thigh, and a thin-line scroll tattoo is visible on her upper arm. Soft natural light and a muted background of green rocks and pale water keep the focus on the tattoos.

Traditional Fine line Upper arm Thigh Forearm Bird Scroll Woman Hat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came back to Porthmellow the week the Gull Dorothy went down off the Shearing Rocks, which my mother said was no coincidence and my father said was simply March. Nobody had asked it to come. It sat on the rail of the net loft with its red throat puffed out like a man who'd paid for the seat, and it eyed me the way the harbourmaster eyed short weights.

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I had been told the bird belonged to old Tamsin Rowe, who kept a cage of them above the chandlery and let them out at dawn to find the boats. Tamsin had been dead a year. Her door was still bolted, and nobody had the stomach to break it. I climbed the back stair with a heel of bread in my coat pocket and found the window open, the room smelling of tar and lavender, and on the table a row of brass buttons laid out in a line, each one stamped with a different anchor.

The bird followed me down to the quay, where the Dorothy's crew were drinking to her memory. I laid the buttons on the bar one by one. The bosun counted them twice and went quiet. The last button had no anchor at all, only a small inked bird, red at the throat and yellow at the wing, the same colours as the creature now hopping along the wood towards his pint.

He pushed that last button back across to me. 'She always said the swallow would bring one home,' he said. 'Not the men. Just the count.' Outside, the tide turned against the harbour wall. The bird lifted off, circled the mast once, and went north over the cliffs, the way the Dorothy had gone.