Traditional colour tattoo of a blue swallow with a banner reading O JOY, flowers and leaves, on a area of skin.

Blue swallow with O JOY banner

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A blue swallow with outstretched wings and grey shading sits above a scrolled banner reading O JOY in black lettering. Orange and yellow flowers with green and red leaves surround the bird, and the banner has bold black outlines. Bold colour fills dominate against a light skin tone, with the pale background giving the design strong contrast.

Traditional Swallow Bird Banner Text Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty days out of Bristol, and the swallow chalked on the fo'c'sle wall had become the only thing aboard that seemed to know where it was going. Somebody had drawn it in the first week, a blue bird with its wings flung wide over a scroll of letters, and nobody had the heart to scrub it off. You caught yourself glancing at it while you spliced the mainsheet, the way other men checked the glass.

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Pell, the cook, a Lancashire man who could not read a menu, swore the words beneath the bird said O JOY, and that some signwriter in Hull had spelt it wrong. Ned Corran, who had been to school, said it was a name, a girl's name, and that she had married a purser in Valparaiso and never looked back. Pell would not be talked out of it. Every Sunday he wiped the flour from his hands and read the banner aloud like a psalm, as though the letters were a lamp he could hold up against the dark.

Off the Horn the topsail tore and the wind came at them from three directions. For two nights nobody slept, and on the third morning the sea lay down flat and grey as a slate. Then the swallows came. Dozens of them, dropping out of nowhere onto the yards, blue backs catching the thin light, so like the painting on the wall that Pell stood on the galley step with a ladle in his fist and wept without shame.

When the land came up grey on the sixtieth morning, you took a stub of chalk from your pocket and drew a small second line beneath the banner, a word you had no business writing. The wind had the powder off the wall before anyone else was on deck to read it.