Two people hold hands to show matching colourful swallow tattoos on their wrists, one in green and orange and one in purple and yellow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching swallow tattoos on two wrists

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side, each with a swallow tattoo in a similar design: a rounded head, curved tail feathers and spread wings. The left bird is green with orange and red accents, and the right bird is purple with yellow and green tones. Both have bold dark outlines, soft colour shading and faint coloured smudges behind them against the skin.

Neo-trad Forearm Swallow Bird Wing Matching tattoo Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you go telling the lamp-room lads that a bird can't be sorry. Our Nan swore she saw the green one at Sallow Pit the morning the cage stuck four hundred feet down, flying in and out of the winding-house slats like it was counting the men back up one by one.

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The purple one came later, the year the wash-house roof went, and it took up with the green under the eaves where the pigeon muck had softened the bricks and kept them warm. Folk said they were a pair, though nobody ever saw either sit still long enough to be sure. They dipped and turned over the tip after the midges rising off the wet slag, tails forked like the points of a compass drawn by a man who'd had a drink.

When the Hartley seam flooded, the green bird went down to the pumping shaft every dawn and the purple one waited on the headgear. Nobody asked them to. On the ninth morning the cage came up with two men still breathing, and both swallows were sat on the rail with their wings half open, as if they'd been paid to keep watch.

Them two are long gone, mind, and the pit with them. But walk up past the old lamp store at dusk and you'll see a green flash and a purple flash cut the sky in two. They never once cross each other's line. That's how a pair stays true, my duck. Each knows exactly where the other is, and goes on regardless.