Black and grey traditional swallow tattoo with small flowers on each of two wrists, photographed palms turned toward the viewer.

Matching swallow and flower wrist tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos sit on the inner wrists, each showing a swallow in flight with outlined wings and a small bird head, accompanied by clusters of stylised flowers. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black areas and grey shading on the wings and petals. The image is a close, evenly lit black and white photograph with the hands and wrists filling the frame.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Flower Floral Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, the band's on its tea break and I've got the floor till the drummer finds his other shoe. You want the story of the swallows. Everybody asks about the swallows and nobody asks why there are two of them, which is the bit that matters.

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Nell and Maureen came up to this hall in the summer of 1958, both seventeen and both sure nobody worth the bother would ever ask them to dance. Maureen had a laugh you could hear over the trumpets. Nell had a letter from a sailor called Ronnie Pell, folded so many times it had gone soft as cloth. He'd written it from a ship bound for Freetown, and in it he swore swallows always find their way back to the same barn, however far they've flown. He was a liar about most things, Nell said, but not about that. He'd seen them do it.

Ronnie never came back up the promenade. The ship went down somewhere past the Azores, and the letter was all Nell had left. So the spring after, she and Maureen sat on the back step of Nell's mother's yard with a darning needle, a bottle of Indian ink and more nerve than sense. They pricked the birds in one each, wings out, with a clump of Michaelmas daisies for company, and Nell's mother shouted from the kitchen that they'd both catch their deaths.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about swallows. They turn up every April, and every April Nell stands in the car park out there with her hand over her eyes, counting. Maureen says she's daft. Then Maureen counts too.