Cream baby cardigan with traditional swallows beside a bodysuit printed with anchors and banners, next to a chalk swallow drawing on a dark grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow designs on baby cardigan and bodysuit

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A cream baby cardigan with two blue and yellow swallows sits on top of a white bodysuit printed with anchors, banners, hearts and other traditional motifs. To the left, a white chalk-style outline of a swallow in flight is drawn on a dark grey backdrop. The flat-lay composition is centred, with the clothing in full colour and the chalk drawing in monochrome.

Traditional Swallow Anchor Heart Banner

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came aboard off Spurn Head, three of them, worn flat from the crossing and too tired to mind the coils of rope. Bosun Ada Clegg counted them the way she counted everything, twice and then again with her thumb pressed to the rail. Two were restless and kept lifting off to the wheelhouse roof. The third sat on the anchor chain and let the mate pass within a yard of it, which Ada said was a bad sign or a good one, depending on who was paying the wages.

Keep reading

Nobody on the Lark had ever seen a swallow settle on a working boat that did not come home. The old men swore by it. Ada swore at them for swearing, then went below and fetched the slate from the galley, where she kept the tally of ports and tides in chalk. She drew the bird in three strokes, forked tail first, the way her father had taught her at the harbour office in Goole, and wrote beneath it the date and the word landed.

By the time the tide turned, the two restless birds had gone east over the sandbanks. The third stayed on the chain through the first watch, and Pip Ransome, the cook's boy, brought it crumbs in a tin lid and was scolded for it. Ada did not scold. In the morning the slate had been wiped clean by somebody's sleeve, so she drew the swallow again, a little bigger, and left the chalk on the sill where the sun would catch it.