Traditional-style tattoos of a swallow, a ship, an eye and a banner on a man's arm, with a chest script partly visible above a white printed tank top.

Swallow, ship and banner tattoos on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A man in a white tank top shows a full sleeve of tattoos on his left arm, including a swallow, a sailing ship on rough waves, an eye and a banner with partly legible lettering. The bold black outlines and areas of grey shading are typical of traditional flash work, with touches of orange and green in the swallow and clouds. The arm is cropped at the chest and shoulder, and a partly visible script tattoo sits on the upper chest.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Chest Swallow Ship Eye Banner Cloud Lightning Script Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhale had the breakfast tray halfway up the stairs when the post boy came running along the front with his cap crushed in one hand, and she knew from the way he slowed at the gate that the envelope was not for the bank. It was for Mr Ruddock, third floor back, who had come ashore in March with a sea-chest, a brass barometer wrapped in a tea towel, and a habit of standing at the window before dawn to read the sky like a newspaper.

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She climbed the rest of the stairs with the tray and found him already dressed, collar buttoned to the throat, the envelope open on the bed. The Maud Eliza had gone down in a squall off the Lizard the week after he was landed sick at Penzance. Eleven men. He had no business being sorry, he said, since the doctor had made him stay off her, but he kept turning the wedding ring he no longer wore, the way a man does with a coin he has lost and found again.

He went to the window. Along the telegraph wire outside the chapel the swallows were lined up like notes on a stave, forty or more, chattering and shifting, all facing the same bit of southern horizon where the clouds were piling into grey towers with lightning moving behind them. Ruddock had a rhyme for the swallows, something his mother used to sing about the ones that come back. Mrs Penhale had never heard the whole of it.

He lifted the sash. The cold came in smelling of salt and coal smoke, and the birds lifted together in one motion, the way a ship's crew moves when the mate says so, and were gone over the roofs. Ruddock stood a while longer with his hand on the sill. Then he picked up the barometer, tapped the glass once, and said the glass was falling, which was the first thing he had said in a week that sounded like himself.