Black and grey traditional tattoo of two swallows, a ball of yarn with crossed knitting needles and a ribbon banner on the upper arm.

Swallows and yarn ball with banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows with forked tails fly above and below a ball of yarn pierced by crossed knitting needles, with a ribbon banner across the centre that carries lettering. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded grey tones giving the yarn and wings their volume. The design fills the frame against a plain skin background, with a striped top visible at the edges.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Yarn Knitting needle Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan knitted with the wireless on and the needles going like a pair of starlings fighting over crusts. In forty winters on Pennock Quay she never dropped a stitch that anyone noticed. Every boat that put out past the breakwater carried one of her jumpers in the wheelhouse, dark wool the colour of wet slate, and every man who came home found a small swallow worked into the cuff. She said swallows always find their way back to the same eaves, and that a fisherman was only a bird with worse navigation.

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The February the Marigold went missing, she sat by the stove with the lamp pulled close and unpicked a whole sleeve. I was nine and held the skein over my hands so she could wind it. "Hold steady, Ruby," she said, "or I'll have you knitted into the next one." The wind worked at the shutters all night. Near dawn she pushed the needles through the middle of the ball, as if pinning a bad thought in place, and said, "Now we wait like proper women."

The Marigold came in at noon on the tide, short a mast and long on stories, and the crew walked up from the slip with their collars turned up. Nan didn't run. She finished the row she was on, then tucked the ball under her arm and went down to meet them, the needles still standing in the wool like the crossed masts of a little ship. Come April the swallows returned to the net loft and built in the same rafters as before. Nan left the yarn on the windowsill all summer, and nobody moved it.