Traditional-style colour tattoo of a purple rose with banner lettering and two swallows on a woman's upper back, seen from behind.

Rose and swallows on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a woman with her hair pinned up, seen from behind. A purple rose sits at the centre with a banner reading STAY TRUE above and BELOVED below, flanked by two swallows with outstretched wings. The bold outlines and flat, saturated colour in purple, blue, red and green suggest a traditional style, set against a soft, blurred green background.

Traditional Back Rose Swallow Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marine Ballroom's floor was sprung so that four hundred dancers could bounce on it at once, and on Saturdays Lottie liked to feel it give under her heels while she waited by the cloakroom with her hat in her hands. The clock above the stage read twenty to ten. Stan had written that he would be on the last train from Portsmouth, and she had believed him the way you believe a tide table.

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She thought about the afternoon she had gone under the arches to Mr Cuthbert's shop, where the needles hummed like a bee trapped in a jar. He had mixed the purple himself from something he called blackberry ink, and he had given her a rose the size of a shilling. When she asked why the swallows, he said they always find their way home, and then he looked at her hands and said, 'Your young man's a sailor, then.' She had not been able to tell him that the banner would say the thing she had been too shy to say aloud.

The band had started a slow foxtrot when the doors swung open and a damp wind came in with him. He wore no uniform, only a navy jumper with the sleeves pushed up, and he carried his kit bag in one hand as though he had forgotten it. He did not say hello. He held out his hand, and she took it, and they went out onto the sprung boards while the couples parted around them. Over his shoulder the lamps of the pier swung like buoys, and in the mirror at the far end of the hall she caught the two of them turning slowly beneath the chandelier, the small ink birds on her collar and the bright ribbon at her throat catching the light.