Two matching traditional swallow tattoos with red breasts and teal flowers sit on the backs of a pair of hands against a polka dot fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching swallows with flowers on the hands

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two mirrored swallows in flight sit side by side on the hands, each with dark navy wings, a red chest and yellow accents. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft shading on the wings and body. Teal and blue flowers with green leaves sit beneath each bird, and a pale lilac wash appears behind them against a white and black polka dot background.

Traditional Hand Swallow Bird Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the lamp room on Tuesday, two of them, and went straight for the brass rail as though somebody had told them where to land. I know you'll say it's nothing but birds, Ada, and you'd be right, but I sat up with them till the light turned and I couldn't help thinking of the twins from the Morrow boat, the ones who used to race them off the slipway.

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Their red chests were the colour of the sealing wax you sent me at Christmas, and the wings went dark at the tips like wet slate. They didn't stay long. Each time the lamp swung round they lifted together, one bird a half-beat behind the other, and swept out over the reef as neat as a pair of shears. I wrote the hour in the log, as regulations say, and then I wrote it again in the margin, which is not regulation at all.

Mr Haskett from the lifeboat came up with the paraffin on Thursday and asked whether the birds were nesting in the gallery. I told him no. Swallows don't nest on a rock with a wind like that, I said, they only pass through to see what's left of the summer. He laughed and said I sounded like a man talking about a woman who had run off with a fish merchant. I didn't correct him.

Keep this letter, will you, and put the spare key under the blue pot if I'm late. I'll be on the Saturday boat if the sea lets me. If you see two swallows on the harbour wall, don't shoo them off. They'll be mine, back a day early, and they'll want looking at.