Traditional style colour tattoo of a swallow in flight beside red rosebuds and gold leaves on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and rosebuds on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight, with dark blue-black plumage and a red breast, sits on a branch with two red rosebuds and gold-toned leaves. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with some soft grey shading on the bird's wing and body. The design fills the frame diagonally, with the bird at upper left and the buds and leaves curving down to the right.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird Rose Rosebud Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and sausage rolls, exactly as I remembered it, and for the first hour I stood by the trestle table pretending I had not come to find Danny Rourke. He was by the fire door telling a man in a golf jumper about the ferry from Harwich, and every so often he touched his shoulder through his shirt, as if something under it was ticking.

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I went over when the DJ started on Dexys. 'You still owe me a Fruit Salad,' I said. He laughed and pulled back his cuff, and there it was: a swallow with its wings thrown back, a red breast like a struck match, and two rosebuds on a gold-leaved branch, all of it outlined so hard it looked drawn with a school ruler. 'Got it in Hull the year my dad died,' he said. 'Dad always said he wanted to see me come home from somewhere.' I did not ask where he thought he had been.

The buds, he said, were the bit he had argued with the artist about. Everyone wanted them open. He wanted them shut, because a closed bud still has the whole summer folded up inside it, and he was not ready to be told how things turned out.

We left at ten. Outside, the car park was grey and wet, and swallows were working the sky above the sports hall, dipping and cutting, never once landing. Danny watched them until his mate leaned out of the minibus and shouted his name. 'Forty years,' he said, 'and they still find the way back.' Then he crossed the tarmac with his hand on his shoulder, and I stood there counting birds until I lost count, which I suppose was the point.