Black line drawing flash of a swallow with spread wings, a pair of scissors, two roses and a CREATE banner, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow, scissors and roses with CREATE banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a swallow-like bird with spread wings holding a curled banner that reads CREATE, with a pair of open scissors to the right and two roses at the base. The linework is bold, even black outlines with detailed feather and petal markings and no shading. The drawing is shown in black on a white background, with the composition centred and the banner running across the lower half.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

The dust got into the cutting table again last night, so the silk for the Halloran wedding has a grey bloom along one edge and I have had to cut around it. You would laugh. I have been standing in the back room with Dad's old shears, the ones with the bent handle, thinking how you always said I could make anything out of a bedsheet if I was annoyed enough.

The road past the water tower has been quiet since you left. Mrs Okafor's boy brought the post up on his bike on Tuesday and there was nothing from you, which I forgave on the grounds that the desert is no place for stamps. The swallows came back to the petrol station roof on Wednesday, the same pair as last year I'd swear, and they sat on the wire looking as though they had been somewhere important and were too polite to say so.

I have put a new pair of shears in the parcel with this letter. They are the good ones from the shop on Fenner Street, with gold screws, and I want them used for something worth the money. Wrap the blades in a rag before you pack them, they bite. There is also a sheet folded inside with a banner drawn on it, and the word across the banner is the one I kept not saying all summer. Create. I know it sounds like something off a library poster. But you were the one who taught me to paint roses on a stripped chair, and I thought you should have the word back in your own hand.

Write when you can. Tell me what the road looks like from the other side.

Love, Nell

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