Small black swallow and star tattoos on two people's hands and wrists as they hold hands outdoors, with a dark tattoo visible on a forearm.

Swallow and star tattoos on joined hands

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold hands across a grassy field, with small black swallow tattoos on the back of one hand and on a wrist, and a small star near the knuckles of the same hand. A darker tattoo is visible on the other person's upper forearm, partly covered by a plaid shirt sleeve. The ink appears to be simple black outline work, and the soft, muted colour palette of the background keeps the focus on the hands.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Varley said a swallow was only worth the miles if somebody was waiting at the far end, so I left mine bare until the Maud Gracie raised the Tyne light, eleven months and four thousand sea miles after we'd cleared Montevideo with a cargo of coal dust and a cook who could not boil an egg. The tattooist in South Shields had a shop smelling of Dettol and burnt sugar, and he drew the first swallow on my hand while the ship's bell rang the watch change through the open door. Nell watched him work with her arms folded, saying nothing, which for Nell was a kind of blessing.

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We were not sweethearts, not properly. We were two deckhands who knew the same stars by their Christian names and had stood the same four-till-eight watches in the Roaring Forties, when the sea came over the rail like a bailiff. She called the star on her knuckle her navigator's mark, a little point of ink for every night she had worked a fix by Canopus when the instruments froze. I thought it was daft. I still do, mostly.

The last swallow went on the Thursday after we paid off. Nell held my wrist, the way you'd hold a mooring line in a squall, and told me that a swallow always finds its way home, which is the only sea story I have ever believed. Then she walked me out onto the Lawe in a wind so cold it made our teeth ache, and we stood on the grass above the river with our hands joined, watching the ferry lights come up the water. Neither of us said anything about the next voyage. We didn't need to.

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