Repeating pattern of blue traditional swallows with red chests and yellow tails, alternating with white nautical stars outlined in black on a pale yellow background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows and nautical stars repeat pattern

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A seamless repeating pattern of blue swallows in mid-flight, each with a red breast, yellow-tipped tail and black outlines. Small eight-point nautical stars with white centres and black outlines sit between the birds on a pale yellow ground. The linework is bold and even, with solid colour fills and no shading.

Traditional Swallow Bird Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had counted the swallows coming in off the Pentland Firth since March, and by the first week of May there were eleven pairs nesting under the gallery rail. Her father said they always came back to the same beams, that a swallow never forgot a roof it had once been dry under. He said it the way he said most things, tapping the barometer with a knuckle and not looking up.

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The relief boat was late. Three weeks, the mail said, though nobody on Skerry Head trusted the mail. The lamp needed its wick trimmed and the paraffin was down to a finger's depth in the drum. Each evening Mara climbed the iron spiral with a tin of oil and a rag and watched the sea go the colour of slate. On the fourth night a swallow dropped past the glass, wings folded like tailor's shears, and skimmed the rail so close she felt the air move on her cheek.

The next morning she found the nest knocked loose by the gale, a bundle of straw and mud lying on the lantern-room floor. Caught in the mud was a brass star, a navigator's button off some drowned coat, worn to a dull shine. Her father had carried one like it for thirty years on the trawlers before his hands went bad. She turned it over in her palm and thought about the boats still out there, feeling their way towards the rocks in the dark.

When the relief boat finally rounded the point, she was already on the gallery with the lamp lit and the nest tucked in the crook of her arm. She said nothing about the star. She only pressed it into the first deckhand's hand and told him to fix it to the wheelhouse. Behind her the swallows wheeled out over the water, blue against the dawn, and did not look back at the land.