Flash-style design of a white skull in a headwrap with an earring over crossed bones, with a small red swallow, on a black background.

Skull, crossed bones and swallow design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A white skull wearing a striped headwrap and a dangling earring sits above two crossed bones, drawn in bold solid shapes with fine black detail lines. A small red swallow in flight sits to the upper right of the skull against the black background. The composition is simple and centred on the skull, with plenty of negative space around the motifs.

Traditional Skull Earring Swallow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came aboard off Lundy with the wind dropping and the sea gone the colour of pewter, and it sat on the main gaff as though it had paid for the passage. Nobody aboard the Kittiwake liked it. Old Sefton Greer, who kept a striped linen headwrap wound tight and a brass hoop in one ear for luck, said swallows did not cross open water unless they were carrying news, and news at sea was usually a hanging matter.

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Dunstan, the boy who kept the powder dry, fed it crumbs from his palm until it stopped shivering. By the third watch it had grown bold enough to dip past the lantern and tug at the lashings, always returning to the same stretch of rail. Greer watched it for an hour before he ordered the helm put over. The bird flew ahead, low and quick, and the crew took it for a fool's errand until the fog thinned and they saw the black teeth of the Gannet Rocks lying a cable's length off the bow, exactly where no chart had put them.

They sailed into Bideford with the Revenue cutter still hunting them somewhere out in the Channel. Greer never told the owners how they got in. That winter he had the bird inked in red on the back of his left hand, and when men asked why a pirate would honour a creature so small, he said a swallow had never once in its life charged a man for directions.