Neo-trad style colour tattoo of a purple and pink swallow with swirling wings and a green eye on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and pink swallow with swirl wings

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised bird, likely a swallow, with a rounded purple head, a green eye and a yellow beak faces left. Its wings are pink and purple with feathered tips and curled, scroll-like shapes at the top. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills dominate the design against a pale skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Uncle Desmond painted the swallow on the bow of the Merry Ellen the spring I turned fourteen, using a pot of plum paint he'd talked the chandler into selling him a shilling under the price. Pink wings, he said, because a bird that flies home should look like it's enjoying the trip. He gave it curls at the top of each wing, like the ends of a fiddle scroll, and a green eye, so the thing could keep watch on the Humber while we were out past the buoys.

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We were out a lot that summer. Ellen was a tired cutter with a weeping stern gland and a cook who wouldn't wash the pans, and the men on the quay called her the Pudding. Desmond never answered to that. He would sit on the cabin hatch with his tea going cold and talk to the swallow as if it were a dog that had wandered off and come back on its own terms. "Look at her," he'd say. "Still pointing the right way."

In October the glass dropped fast and we ran for the lee of the wall with the mainsail half stowed. I was at the tiller and Desmond was on the foredeck with the lamp. The bow lifted and came down so hard that a sheet of green water hit the painted beak full in the face. He laughed like a drain. Then he stopped, because the lamplight had caught the eye, and the eye was looking at him.

We made the harbour at first light. The swallow was still wet and still facing the same way, out to sea. Desmond said that was the trouble with swallows. Home was never where you'd left it.

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