Black and grey traditional tattoo of roses, swallows and leaves with script lettering and a date on a forearm.

Roses and swallows with script on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows two swallows perched among several roses and leaves, with a script word curling between them and a date set on a branch at the base. The linework is bold and clean, with shading in black and grey that gives the roses and feathers depth. The composition climbs vertically up the forearm, with the branch and date at the wrist and the leaves reaching toward the elbow.

Traditional Forearm Rose Swallow Leaves Branch Script Date Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that ladle, Tom, and stop picking at the biscuit before I've got the pot on. Right. You want the tale of the two swallows, and I'll tell it once, so keep your hands still. Old Wrexham Penny came aboard the Marigold Rose at Bristol with a sea chest, a bad cough and a pair of birds already inked on his forearm, done by a man in Valparaiso who worked by a paraffin lamp and took his fee in rum. Every sailor knows a swallow stands for five thousand miles, so Penny had himself a pair of them before he'd even seen the Cape.

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He had the roses put on too, one for every port where some girl had pressed a flower into his palm and got a kiss for her trouble. Then he had a branch drawn under the lot, with a date cut into the bark, the day he swore on his mother's Bible he'd walk up Clifton Hill again. The name curling between the birds like a ribbon, he never once said out loud in this galley, and I'll not be the one to say it now.

Eleven years on, he came back up that hill with his sleeve rolled to the elbow and the birds looking the wrong way round, the way ink goes when a man has been sun-cooked too long. The house had a new gate and fresh paint. A woman at the door said the family had gone to Canada, but she handed him a jar of pressed roses that had been left on the step for whoever came asking. Penny sat on the kerb and held it up to the light until the petals turned the colour of stewed tea.

The jar went into his sea chest and stayed there. Penny sailed another nine years, and whenever a young hand asked why the swallows faced each other across his wrist, he'd say they were only keeping an eye on the date.