Traditional colour tattoo of a grey swallow with red five-petal flowers and olive leaves on a limb.

Swallow and red flowers in traditional style

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight with outstretched grey wings and an orange-edged tail and forehead sits at the centre, with three red flowers with orange centres and olive-green leaves arranged around it. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the grey wing shading fades smoothly into the lighter skin tones. The design fills the frame against a plain, slightly textured skin background.

Traditional Other Swallow Bird Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow was already inside when I came down to light the range, perched on the brass rail above the snug as if it had booked a room. Grey back, rust-edged tail, a throat the colour of a postbox. It was the second week of January and the snow had buried the lower terrace of the valley, so I could not tell you how it had got past the fell wall. Mrs Tennant swore it was a sign. I told her signs were for people with nothing to do, then fetched the bread knife, because I had left the scullery window ajar all night for the steam off the wet coats.

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She wanted it out. I didn't. I opened the back door, scattered a handful of crumbs on the step, and the bird dropped from the rail onto the frame and looked past me at the tin tray hanging behind the bar. My father had painted it the year he bought the place, when we still sold tea and penny buns to the lead miners. Red blooms with yellow eyes, and olive leaves gone soft with age. The swallow flicked its forked tail, pecked twice at the painted petals as though they might be real, and then it went out into the white and I lost it before I'd finished blinking.

The thaw came early that year and ran brown down the lane. In March a letter arrived from Hull, addressed in a hand I had not seen since I was nine. It asked whether the room above the stables was still there, and whether anyone had kept the nest under the eaves.

I did not ask how he knew about the nest. I aired the room, swept the dust from the sill, and left the window open the width of a hand.