Black and white photo of a traditional style swallow and rose tattoo on a man's neck, above a suit collar.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and rose on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up shows a man's neck and jaw, with a traditional style tattoo of a swallow with raised wings beside a rose and leaf motif. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded areas giving the wings and petals some depth. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, framed by a white shirt collar, a dotted tie and a grey suit jacket.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Porthmellow the week the Marigold went out and did not return by dark. Nan Teague counted them from the harbour wall, as she counted everything, and got seven. Seven was the number of boats still out, so she went home, put the kettle on, and did not sit down.

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Her husband had taught her the old saying: a swallow knows the way home because it has never once been lost. He had also taught her that the sea did not care for sayings. Fog came up off the bar at midnight, thick as wool, and the harbour lamps went soft and then went out. Nan went down to the wall anyway with a lantern. The swallows were there, low over the water, turning and dipping, the tips of their wings lifted as if they were pointing.

She followed them. Along the mole, past the rusted bollard, past the place where the spring tide had taken the old slipway. Out beyond the bar a single light answered her lantern, then another. The Marigold came in on the swell with her hull scraped and her crew soaked through, and young Ned at the tiller, holding a sprig of red rose he had torn from the chapel wall on his way down to the boat, for luck, though he never once admitted it.

In the morning the swallows had gone south again, every one of them. Nan found the rose lying on the step, still red, and pressed it between the pages of the tide tables, where it stayed red for years.

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