Traditional style swallow tattoo in black and grey on a forearm, holding a beaded chain and a red rose in an oval locket.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and rose locket on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey swallow in flight holds a beaded chain that hangs down to an oval locket. Inside the locket is a red rose with green leaves, the only strong colour in the design. The bold outlines and smooth shading on the bird's wings and body give the piece a classic, solid look.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Rose Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows had come back to the shed eaves on the third of April, the same morning Ruth Garside noticed the rose by the back wall had broken into bud. She counted them from the kitchen window with a tea towel over her shoulder: four birds, one with a ragged tail that her husband Tom used to swear belonged to a lad from the next village who never paid his debts. Tom had been dead eleven months. The locket was still in the drawer by the sink, its chain tangled like wet thread.

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She had found it in the bottom of his coat pocket, an oval tin thing with a rose pressed under a crack of glass. He had never said who it was for. She had decided, for want of a better guess, that it was for her, and that he had simply been too shy to say so in forty-one years of marriage.

On Saturday she carried the locket out to the border with a trowel and a jar of bone meal. The swallows dipped and chittered overhead. One came down so low she felt the air shift against her cheek, and when she looked up it was hanging there, wings stiff, eyeing the glint of the chain in her fist as though it had been waiting for it. She opened her hand. It took the beads in its beak and lifted off with a jerk, and the locket swung beneath it like a little bell.

She watched it circle the chimney twice, then vanish over the allotments towards the canal. Nobody had ever told her swallows carried things. She stood with the empty trowel while the rose opened red against the wall, and thought that Tom would have laughed himself sick at her, and that she would have to find a new place for the bone meal.