Colour tattoo of red camellias with leaves and a bud on the shoulder blade, and a brown swallow with falling petals and a second camellia lower on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Camellias and a swallow across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

The image shows a bare back with a large red camellia branch on the upper shoulder, including several open blooms, a bud and dark green leaves. Lower on the right side, a brown and black swallow flies beside scattered red petals, with a smaller red camellia below it. The shading is smooth and realistic, with bright red and green ink and soft tonal blending on the petals and feathers against a plain dark background.

Japanese Botanical Back Shoulder Flower Bud Leaves Swallow Bird Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Tennant kept the galley fire banked on the Corrie Lass, and every morning she counted the biscuit tins before the men woke. The swallow came in off the grey water on the third day out from Cork, too tired to mind the smoke, and settled on the rail above the potato sacks. The mate wanted it wrung for luck, which was the wrong way round, as every sailor knew that a swallow meant land was near.

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Maud did not wring it. She fed it crumbs of ship's bread and tied a red ribbon from the stores around the rail so it would not fall into the coal bin. Her grandmother had kept a camellia in a clay pot on a Dorset windowsill, and the old woman said the flowers dropped whole rather than fading one petal at a time, so that nothing was left behind to wither. Maud pressed a sprig of the last pale bloom between the pages of the hymnal and pinned it to the galley beam.

On the seventh morning the bird was gone, and the coast of Kerry lay low and green to the north. Maud found three red petals on the flour sacks, which was strange in January, and a single brown feather snagged on the ribbon. The mate said the swallow had flown for the shore. Maud said it had only gone ahead to tell the kettle.

That evening she laid the feather in the hymnal beside the pressed flower, and when the bell rang for the pilot boat she was already reaching for the tins.