Black and grey traditional style tattoos on a forearm, including a feather, a sunflower, a lotus and a swallow on the hand, with a dagger and a heart nearby.

Forearm sleeve with feather and swallow

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm and hand, with a sleeve of black and grey tattoos. The main motif is a large feather running diagonally across the forearm, flanked by a sunflower, a lotus, a winged dagger, a small heart and a skull-like shape near the elbow. A swallow sits on the back of the hand, with the words HANDS and AMATEUR on the fingers and side of the hand. The tattoos use bold outlines and solid shading against a pale grey textured wall, with a white t-shirt and a wristwatch in view.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Hand Feather Swallow Lotus Sunflower Heart Dagger Wing Skull Text Watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down onto the granary wall just as Idra was counting out the last of the barley, and it did not fly off when she raised her hand. It sat on her knuckle as though it had been sent, with a feather caught in its tail, longer than its body and the colour of wet slate.

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Her mother had always said that a swallow which stays is carrying a message, and that a feather is the weight of the message. So Idra took the feather, which was heavier than it looked, and walked it down to the lotus pond where the old ferryman kept his boat. He sat on the landing with a dagger across his knees, cutting a sunflower stem into green rings for the goats. He did not look up. "Who sent it?" he asked. "The sun," she said, because she did not know what else to say, and he laughed so hard he dropped a ring into the water.

The ferryman had a rule that every passenger paid with a true word, written on a strip of bark and dropped in the pond. He handed her a stub of charcoal. She wrote HANDS, then stopped, because her fingers were still grey with barley dust and the word looked like a lie. She wrote AMATEUR beneath it, which was what the weavers called her for trying the loom at midsummer, and felt foolish. The ferryman read the bark, nodded, and rowed her across without a coin.

On the far bank the feather lifted out of her hand and became a sail, and the swallow went ahead of it, low over the water, toward a town she had only heard of in songs. She looked back once. The barley was gone from the granary wall, and in its place someone had written the same two words in charcoal, in a hand she did not yet know.