Traditional-style flash drawing of a swallow in flight with a rope-wrapped anchor, roses and vines on a blue patterned background.

Swallow and anchor flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold outlined swallow flies over a rope-wrapped anchor, with small pink roses and leafy vines around its body and wings. The linework is dark and heavy, with stippled shading on the bird's back and a soft red blush on its breast. The design sits on a muted blue background with a faint, tonal floral pattern behind it.

Traditional Swallow Anchor Rope Rose Flower Vine Bird

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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

Dear Nan, the rain has not let up since Tuesday and the stall outside the fish market smells of wet cardboard and diesel, but I have found the thing you asked about. A man at the back of the covered arcade sells old chandlery off a trestle table, coils of hemp, brass cleats gone green, and tucked under a tin of tacks was a rope-wrapped anchor no bigger than my hand. The rope on it is still tight, every strand laid the way your father taught you to lay them, so I knew it was real work and not some Brighton souvenir.

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He wanted eleven pounds. I offered six and he laughed at me and said the swallow alone was worth that, so I asked what swallow, and he tipped the anchor to the lamp and there was a little bird scratched into the shank, wings back, diving like it had just seen the harbour. I think it was the same bird you drew on the back of my birthday card when I was small, the one you said would always find its way home. I paid the eleven.

I am posting it to you in a biscuit tin with newspaper round it, so please do not open it at the post office counter. Put it on the windowsill where the light comes in before the tide turns. Tell me if the bird still looks like it is going somewhere.