Colour tattoo of a blue swallow with a pink blossom and green leaves on a person's upper chest, near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue swallow and blossom on upper chest

Traditional · Chest · Colour · Photo

A blue swallow in flight faces left, with a pink blossom above its wings and curling green leaves below it. Soft brown and grey shading sits behind the bird, giving a smoky, swirling background. The tattoo sits on the upper chest near the shoulder, with a teal top and pink beads at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Neo-trad Chest Swallow Bird Blossom Flower Leaves Swirl Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Kellow Cove had seen a swallow out over the water before the herring came, so when the blue one dropped onto the bow of Tom Ferrar's boat, the men stopped coiling rope to watch it. It sat there with its head turned west, as if listening for something beyond the headland, and would not be shooed.

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Old Bess Penhale, who mended nets on the slip and said less than anyone, climbed down the steps on her bad knee and looked at the bird for a long while. "It's come to tell you where the smoke is," she said. Tom laughed, but the fog had sat on the bay for three days, the lamps on the far rocks had been swallowed by it, and nobody had found the gap in the reef.

They went out anyway, following the bird. It flew ahead in short low arcs, dipping over the water and rising again, and when the fog thinned to a grey curl around the hull, the bird banked left, then right, and the men felt the swell lift beneath them where the channel ran deep. Blossom from the blackthorn on the headland drifted down onto the deck, pale pink petals that had no business being there in March.

They came in at dusk with a full hold and a boy's hand bleeding where a line had caught it. Bess was waiting on the slip. Tom held up the first basket and said the swallow had gone on past the reef, out toward nothing. She nodded as though she had expected it. "They always go where the water is safe," she said, "and they never stay to be thanked." That night the men pinned a scrap of blue cloth to the mast, and every spring after, somebody in Kellow Cove saw a swallow over the harbour and went down to the slip to watch it fly.