Traditional style flash design of two swallows, a red rose, a red heart, a banner reading All of time and space, a pocket watch and a sonic screwdriver style pen, on a tan background.

Swallows, rose and heart flash with banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The design shows two swallows, a red rose, a red heart crossed by a pen-like object, and a pocket watch, with a banner across the centre reading All of time and space and Allons-y. Bold black outlines define the forms, with shading in deep reds, oranges and yellows and a blue flower and green leaves filling the composition. Small black stars are scattered around the edges on a plain tan background.

Traditional Swallow Rose Heart Banner Pocket watch Flower Leaves Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit close, the fire's the only warm thing for ten miles. You've heard of Ada Pell, who mended clocks above the bakehouse in Thornwick? No? Then listen. Her brass pocket watch had stopped at a quarter past four, the same hour every morning for forty years, and nobody could say why she kept winding it.

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One January the swallows that roosted under her eaves never flew south. They sat in a row on the telegraph wire, pale and stiff, and Ada knew they were waiting for her. She took the watch, a thin pen-shaped tool from her apron pocket, and a heart-shaped locket of rust-red enamel she had never opened, and walked out into the drift toward the old railway cutting.

At the cutting the snow stopped falling in a circle around her. A tall stranger in a battered coat stood on the sleepers, hands in his pockets, grinning as though he'd been expecting her for a long while. 'Allons-y,' he said, and offered his arm. She refused it, then took it anyway, because the swallows had gone quiet on the wire behind her.

They walked, and the sound of the bells came back to Thornwick all at once, a whole year of them. When Ada got home the bakehouse clock read a quarter past four, and for the first time in forty years it told the right hour. The watch in her hand had started ticking again, and the swallows were gone, though the locket stayed warm and she never opened it, not once.