Traditional colour tattoo of a swallow holding a ribbon above a red heart with a banner reading MOM, on the inner forearm of a person in a black top and denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and heart with MOM banner on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A swallow with dark blue and black wings and a red-orange beak holds a trailing ribbon above a red heart. A cream banner across the heart reads MOM in black capitals, with a green leaf tucked behind the bird's wing. Bold black outlines and flat solid fills in red, blue, green and black, with little shading, sit against the forearm in a plain, well-lit outdoor setting.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Heart Banner Mom Ribbon Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the swallows came back to the Harrow Mill and nested under the eaves, and every spring Agnes Pell tied a length of red ribbon to her yard gate so they would know which house was hers. Her son Tomas had gone south to the docks the summer he turned seventeen. He had promised to write. He did not write, not once in six years, and Agnes stopped asking the postman.

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In the seventh spring a swallow came down onto the gate with a strip of cream cloth in its beak. Its back was dark blue and the tips of its wings were black, and tucked behind one wing was a green leaf, as if it had been picked up on the way. The cloth trailed like a tail. Agnes took it gently, the way you would take a dropped glove, and only when she turned it over in the kitchen light did she see the word inked across it in black capitals: MOM.

She sat on the step with the cloth in her lap. The swallow stayed on the gate and watched her, and it did not fly off until she stood up, and then only as far as the lintel above the door. Tomas had always been the one to tie things in the wrong places. When he was small he had knotted her ribbon to the pump handle, and she had never once told him it was the wrong place.

She had no address to write back to. Instead she cut a length of her own red ribbon, knotted the cream cloth to the end of it, and tied the pair to the gate. That summer five swallows nested under the eaves, and the dark-winged one sat on the gate each morning with its feathers fluffed against the wind. Every morning Agnes came out with the bread, and every morning it was there, and she did not ask it where it had been.