Traditional tattoo of a black swallow with a red breast, a dagger-like blade and a red rose with green leaves, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black swallow with a red underside sits above a red rose with dark outlines and green leaves trailing down the left. A thin dagger-like blade runs behind the bird from the top of the frame. Bold black linework and solid flat fills give a classic traditional look, with the design set against pale skin on the inner forearm.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Rose Dagger Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the stove and take your boots off, the floor is the only warm thing on this side of the river. The dog thinks every traveller carries bread, so don't mind him. My grandmother ran this crossing before the new poles went up, and she told it like this: the swallows own the river, and we only rent the bank.

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In the year the bridge flooded, a clerk named Ilie Varga came up from the lowland with a tin of rose cuttings and a steel letter opener he'd been given for his posting. He was not a cruel man, only a careful one. Every evening he pinned the day's papers to the post with that blade, and every morning a pair of swallows came down the gorge and sat on the crossbar, chattering at the gate as if they were the ones who needed stamping. He grew sick of them. He said they got their feathers in his ink.

One April the swallows did not come, and the roses in the tin went black at the tips. Ilie sat beside them with the blade on the desk. Then a single swallow flew in through the open door with a thread of red wool wound round one leg and dropped it across his papers. The thread ran over the water to a girl on the far bank who had waited all winter to be let through with her mother's name. He cut the wool with the blade, stamped her paper, and lifted the barrier himself.

The bird went back over the river with its tail forked like a pair of scissors, and by morning the rose in the tin had opened red. My grandmother said the gate has stood open every spring since, and nobody has ever asked the swallows for papers.