Traditional flash design of two swallows, five-point stars, red roses and a cream flower on a scroll banner reading LIVE LOVE SOCIAL WORK, with no body placement shown.

Swallows, roses and a banner reading Live Love Social Work

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured flash-style drawing of two swallows flying above a central scroll banner that reads LIVE LOVE SOCIAL WORK. Below the banner sit a cream flower, red roses, green leaves and a pair of small yellow and red blossoms, with dark blue stars placed around the top. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, gold, blue and green give it a classic traditional look, arranged symmetrically on a plain white background.

Traditional Swallow Star Rose Banner Scroll Flower Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the Welfare the same week the last cage came up from Ellen Pit, and nobody in Harrowgate Row had the heart to knock their mud nests off the gutter. I had a little hatchback with a cracked windscreen, a clipboard listing forty-one households, and a boot full of tinned peaches the chapel had donated for children whose fathers no longer went underground.

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Agnes Dunn was waiting on her front step when I pulled up, a tin bath of geraniums at her feet and a cigarette she wasn't supposed to have. 'You're late, pet,' she said, though I was early. 'Kettle's on. The lad next door says you lot write everything down.' I told her I wrote down what people needed, and she laughed so hard she had to sit on the edge of the bath. 'Then write down that I need nothing,' she said, 'except someone to tell the council my roses are not weeds.'

We sat in her back kitchen while the kettle shrieked, and she showed me a photograph of her husband Frank in a hard hat, grinning against a headframe, with two swallows inked on the back by a lad who had done it in the pit baths for a shilling. 'Frank said the birds always come back to the same place,' she said. 'Doesn't matter how many times the roof falls in.' I thought about the forty-one names and how the job had shrunk to a pen and a drive between them.

When I left, the sky over the spoil heap had gone the deep blue of a bruise healing, and the first stars were out above the chapel. Swallows lined the telegraph wire like notes on a stave. On the clipboard, beside Agnes's name, I wrote the only thing she had asked for: roses, not weeds. Then I drove home slowly, under the stars, past the birds.