Traditional style flash drawing of a blue swallow with black wings and a pink bow, with the word Love in black script above it.

Swallow with Love script

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A blue swallow with black-and-white striped wings and a pink bow on its head flies to the right, with the word Love in flowing script above. The design uses bold black outlines, with soft shading and highlights in blue, pink and yellow on the bird. It is drawn on a plain white background with a balanced, centred composition.

Traditional Swallow Bird Love Script Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, the lot of you, and mind the embers, because this is the one about the swallow that came over Carrow Wood with a ribbon in its hair and a word in its beak. You'll not believe it, and that's no matter. Old Hannah at the forge-end saw it with her own eyes, and she never told a lie in her life except about her age.

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The word was Love, written in fancy letters that curled like bramble, and the bird was carrying it to the blacksmith's boy, Edwin Pell, who had been sweet on the miller's girl since Lammas. Every morning he stood at the fork in the path where the trees thin out, and every morning the swallows went over him, low and quick, chattering as if they knew his business. Edwin had no paper, no ink and no nerve, so he said nothing at all, which the miller's girl took as a kind of answer.

The swallow came down over the hedge on a Tuesday, dipped one black wing like a man tipping his hat, and set the word on the gatepost for anyone to read. The miller's girl read it first, being nosy. Then she read it again, out loud, and the whole lane heard, and that was the end of Edwin's silence, though not of his blushing, which lasted until Michaelmas.

And that's why no swallow nests over Pell's forge to this day. They say the bird still flies the lane every spring, blue as a good tide and twice as stubborn, checking the gatepost for the word it left there. It's still legible, which is more than you can say for most of the things men mean.