Close-up of a colour traditional tattoo of red roses with green leaves on a woman's shoulder, with a small swallow in flight below them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses and swallow on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of three red roses with dark green leaves across the shoulder, with a swallow in flight beneath them. The outlines are bold and dark, and the roses are shaded in deep reds with lighter highlights. The tattoo sits against bare skin, with a fine chain necklace and a pendant visible at the upper chest, and the head is cropped out of the frame.

Traditional Shoulder Rose Swallow Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Ivy kept three rose bushes in paint buckets along the walkway of Ashcombe House, fourteenth floor, and every spring she swore the swallows nesting under our balcony were the same ones from the year before. I was nine. I believed the lift only worked if you hit the button with your knuckle, so I believed most things she told me.

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The roses were red as pillar boxes and twice as stubborn. Every May the blackfly arrived in a grey cloud and Nan went out in her housecoat with a jam jar of soapy water, flicking them off one leaf at a time while she told them exactly what she thought of them. The swallows dipped past the railings in long black stitches, forked tails open, dropping to the car park and rising again as if the whole estate were a sewing box they'd been hired to mend. Nan called the one that always came back first the Sunday bird, because it arrived the morning the council finally cut the grass.

The letter came in August. Ashcombe was coming down by Christmas and we were being moved to a ground floor flat in Dunmore Road with a patch of garden and no balcony at all. Nan read the letter twice, folded it into a square, then went out and started lifting her roses with a kitchen spoon, one root ball at a time, wrapping each in a tea towel as if it might catch cold.

The removal van took the buckets, the telly and the wardrobe with the cracked mirror. On the motorway, somewhere past the retail park, I turned round to watch the tower shrink, and a swallow was keeping pace with us above the lorries, wings going like a needle. Nan had her palm flat on the back window and didn't say a word, which for her was practically a speech. The bird peeled off over the flyover and I watched until it was only a speck against the grey.