Traditional-style flash design of two swallows above a red heart with flames and a LOVE banner on an orange background, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows, heart and LOVE banner flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The design shows two swallows with spread wings perched above a red heart, with a cream and black scroll banner reading LOVE across the centre. Flames or roots sprout from beneath the heart, and small purple and green buds sit at the top. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, purple, yellow and orange sit against a plain orange background.

Traditional Swallow Heart Banner Love Flame Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Mercy Lane every spring, and every spring Mrs Pell at the boarding house said they were the same two, because she had seen them mend the same nest under the guttering for thirty years. Nobody in Sandgate argued with her. The sea had taken her husband off the pier in the winter of the great frost, and what the town knew of her was that she kept a red lamp burning in the front window until the last lodger was in and the door bolted.

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In the June of the year the new lodger came, a tall man with a canvas bag and no name he would give, she noticed the birds were late. They sat on the chimney pot in the rain and did not dive for the flies over the harbour. He paid for three weeks in coins he counted out on the hall table, one at a time, and asked if there was a fire in the back room where he could dry his boots. She told him there was always a fire. That was what the lamp was for.

On the last evening he came down with his bag packed and stood in the doorway looking at the sky, where the swallows had at last come out and were stitching the dusk together over the water. He said the birds had been carrying something for him, a message from a woman in the next town who had kept a lamp of her own. Mrs Pell only shook her head and bolted the door behind him. In the morning the coins were still on the table, stacked in a neat red heap, and the nest under the guttering was empty, though the swallows were back on the wire, two of them, wings spread, waiting for the tide to turn.