Traditional style tattoo of two swallows, a red and grey anchor, rope and yellow flowers across an upper arm.

Swallows, anchor and flowers on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two swallows with outstretched wings, an anchor wrapped in rope, and yellow five-petal flowers with green leaves filling the gaps. The bold black outlines are paired with flat, solid fills in red, yellow, blue and green, with grey shading on the wings and anchor. The design wraps around the upper arm of a person wearing a white vest, with the subject's face out of frame.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird Anchor Rope Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last stopping train has gone and the platform is quiet enough to hear the swallows squabbling in the iron eaves. You have swept the same yard of wet tarmac for twenty minutes, mostly because the anchor is still leaning against the waiting room door where Mr Pruett left it, and nobody has decided whether it belongs to the railway or to the Humber lighterman who dragged it out of the mud last spring.

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Pruett kept it chained by the ticket hatch for thirty years, its rope gone grey and soft as cat fur. He used to say the swallows came back every April because they knew a hook when they saw one, and that a station without a bird nest was just a shed with a timetable. You never believed him. Yet every year you have watched the pair of them stitch mud and straw into the same bracket above the lamp, and every year the fluke of that anchor has taken on another thin coat of rust.

The rope slides when you lift it. Under the grey is a bright thread of orange twine, the kind the signal gangs used to tie down their tarpaulins, and tucked into the coil is a folded lighterman's docket for a cargo nobody ever collected. You read the name on it twice. Then you hang the anchor back on its hook, and above you the swallows drop out of the eaves in a loose spiral and settle, one after another, on the cold iron shank as if it were a branch.