Two traditional style swallow tattoos in teal and red with black outlines, placed side by side on a forearm.

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Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two swallows fly in opposite directions across two forearms, each with bold black outlines, grey and black wings and an orange wing bar. One bird has a teal body and the other has a red body. The shading is smooth and solid, and the birds sit close together, mirroring each other in the frame.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rope, boy, and sit where I can see your face. You want to know why Tomas Pell never went back to Corran Island with his pay in his pocket? Then listen. The swallows came in off the Atlantic the spring the Mary Ann lost her foremast, two of them, one with a back the colour of a teal sea and the other with a breast like a pillar box. They sat on the bowsprit as if they'd paid for the passage.

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Pell was the only one aboard who fed them. Biscuit crumbs on his palm every morning while the old man cursed the cook. The teal one let him near. The red one never did, only flew loops through the rigging and came back to the same cleat. When we raised Corran harbour, the red one went ashore first, straight over the harbour wall, and nobody thought more of it.

Pell's sweetheart kept the chandlery on the quay, a widow called Nessa Ross with flour on her wrists. He walked up the hill with his duffel and found her shutters down. The neighbours said a red bird had sat on her sill for three days, refusing crumbs and looking at the door.

So he stood where she could see him from the window and whistled the way he'd whistled to the teal one. Two swallows lifted off the slate roofs at once, wheeled once over the harbour, and went on out over the water toward the open sea. Pell never said which of them was the one he'd lost, and I never asked him. Some things you let fly.