Round badge showing a red traditional-style swallow holding a banner that reads MOTHER, above a red flower with green leaves.

Swallow and MOTHER banner design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A red swallow with black-outlined wings holds a cream banner lettered MOTHER in black capitals. A red flower with green leaves sits beneath the banner, with a cream background inside a metal rim. The bold outlines and flat areas of solid colour are typical of traditional American tattoo flash.

Traditional Swallow Bird Banner Lettering Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down onto the foremast yard three days out from Lymestone, red as a coal and worn to nothing, its wings folded like wet gloves. Tobias Quayle watched it from the rail with his cap in his hands while the watch below argued about whether it was a sign. Bosun Haddow said it meant land within the week. Tobias said nothing. He knew the bird was no omen. Swallows came back to the same eaves every spring, and he had been away so long he had forgotten which eaves were his.

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The Constance Vale made her berth on a Thursday with the tide running hard against the wall. He went up Gull Row with his sea bag over one shoulder, past the chandler's and the shuttered bakehouse, counting doors by the blue paint he remembered. The bird had followed the ship in, circling the mast, and now it went ahead of him low over the cobbles, lighting on a sill where a pot of geraniums had been kept alive through three winters by someone who was not him.

He stopped at the gate where the paint had flaked to grey. Tacked beneath the knocker was a strip of cream card, lettered in black capitals as neatly as any sign-writer could manage, and it said only the one word he had never once put in his letters home, because he had thought it too soft for a man who went to sea. He read it twice. Before he could lift the latch the door opened, and his mother stood there with flour to her wrists, looking at the sea bag as though it were the first thing she had ever loved that had come back.