Traditional style colour tattoo of two swallows, a birdcage with a heart and a yellow rose on a forearm, shown in three close-up photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows, birdcage and rose on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A collage of three photographs of a colour tattoo showing two swallows in flight above a pink and blue birdcage with a red heart inside. Purple and yellow flowers, a yellow rose with blue-green leaves and scrollwork fill the lower part of the design. Bold black outlines, solid fills and a brick wall backdrop frame the close-up views.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Birdcage Heart Rose Flower Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lantern steady, boy, and don't you touch that cage. Yes, the one with the red heart. Old Tobias Crane carried it round the Horn the year the Marigold lost her foretopmast, and he never once let it out of his sight, not even when the sea came over the rail and drowned the galley stove.

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Ada Lowe had folded that heart from a valentine in the cooper's yard at Bristol and pinned it inside the bars with a length of yellow thread. Tobias swore he'd open the door on the quay when he came home and let the bird go. The swallows came out to meet us off Ushant, two of them, dark-backed and forked-tailed, and they stayed in the rigging past the Lizard, past the Scillies, past every mark a man could name with his eyes shut.

Then the wind backed hard off the Horn and the cage tore loose from its lashing. Tobias went up the ratlines after it with the sea grinding under him, and when he came down he had it in his fist, bent and bloodied but whole, the heart still pinned inside. The swallows had gone by then, but he swore he heard them that night, chattering in the dark above the wheel as if they were counting the miles home.

We made Bristol in the spring. He opened the door on the quay, and the bird flew straight up into the chimney smoke of the cooperage, and there was Ada standing on the cobbles with a yellow rose in her hand. Now pass me that lamp, and mind the third rung. It's loose.