Cross-stitch on linen of a traditional style tattoo design with two swallows, a lotus, a red heart and the word LOVE on a banner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows, heart and LOVE banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A cross-stitched design on off-white linen showing two blue swallows flanking a pink lotus, with a red heart in the centre. A white banner reading LOVE in black stitches crosses the heart, with a second red heart and yellow and orange flames below. The bold outlines and flat fills in red, blue, yellow and pink give it a classic traditional tattoo look.

Traditional Swallow Heart Lotus Banner Love Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Aga had gone out again by the time I found the linen in the bottom of Gran's trunk, folded round a tin of sugar mice. It was a cushion front, half finished, its threads gone soft with damp. Two swallows flung their wings up either side of a lotus, a red heart sat beneath the flower, and LOVE ran across the middle on a white ribbon. Below, a second heart threw out orange flames, every square counted in a fierce, careful hand.

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Dad came in from the lambing shed with snow in his eyebrows and asked what I'd found. I told him Gran had been making it for Hal Pritchard the winter he went out to Canada, and that she'd never finished it. He sat on the arm of the settle and turned the frame over in his big hands. "She unpicked that twice," he said. "Said the swallows looked like they'd fly off the cloth before she was done with them."

We sat with it between us while the wind tried the back door. Outside, the ewes were a grey smudge against the hedge, and the frost had made the yard glitter like spilt glass. I thought about the swallows that came back to our barn every April, returning to the same beam year after year though the roof had leaked and the mortar had crumbled, as if the place had been promised to them.

Dad found a reel of blue thread in the drawer and threaded the needle first time, which surprised us both. "Your gran would have had us stitching by now," he said. I took the needle. We worked by the lamp until the flames were done, and in the morning the cushion lay on the table, finished, its edges still stiff with cold.