Traditional colour tattoo of a reclining pin-up woman with dark hair, with swallow and anchor details, shown on a section of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reclining pin-up with swallows in traditional style

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A reclining pin-up woman with dark hair in a rolled style sits on her side, with her head propped on one hand and her body wrapped in tattooed limbs. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in orange, red, olive and blue define the figure, with some shading on the skin tones and bottom garment. The composition fills most of the frame, with a blurred background of skin and a dark shape in the lower left.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Swallow Anchor Hair Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Fennick Bay the same week the lodger's trunk did, and Ada Pell took both as bad news. She stood on the back step of Seaview House with a tea towel over her shoulder and watched the birds stitch the air above the harbour wall. Her late husband had sailed on the Corinna for twenty years and come home with two swallows inked on his hand, one for each way across the Atlantic, he used to say, though he had never once been further than Cork.

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The trunk belonged to a woman called Dolly Marr, who had arrived in April with a bow in her hair the colour of a postbox and a laugh that carried up the stairs. Dolly paid in advance and in cash, and never once asked when the bathwater would be hot. She spent her days on the shingle, propped on one elbow with her head in her hand, reading the same paperback while the tide came and went. Ada had decided not to like her. It was going poorly.

On Thursday the trunk's brass catch sprang open on its own, and under a pile of silk stockings lay a rolled canvas with an anchor sketched on the back in red chalk. Ada unrolled it on the kitchen table. It was a painting of Dolly herself, reclining just so, one arm looped round a ship's anchor, a swallow perched on each knee and a third at the hip. Underneath, in careful capitals: FOR WHOEVER KEEPS THE ROOM WARM. D.

Ada sat down heavily. Then she climbed the stairs, knocked on the attic door, and found it open onto a room that smelled of turpentine and salt, the bed made tight as a sail. She propped the canvas against the pillow where a head would rest. Outside, the swallows were already darting over the water, and Ada went down to the kitchen, lit the range, and filled the kettle for a guest who might not come back.