Three blue traditional swallow designs in flight with black outlines on a cream background, shown as flash.

Three swallows in flight

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Three swallows are drawn in flight at different angles on a cream background. Each bird has bold black outlines, with blue and teal shading across the wings and tails and white left unshaded on the bodies. The colour is applied in smooth gradients, and the birds are spaced apart in a loose triangular arrangement.

Traditional Swallow Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

'Mind the mortar, Mr Quayle, it's not dry yet,' Mrs Ada Pell called up the ladder, but he was already reaching for the nest under the gutter with the scraper.

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There were three of them, three cups of mud pressed against the brickwork above the front door of Seaview House, and every spring the same three birds came back to argue over them. Quayle had paid his rent in advance for the summer and complained about the droppings on the step. He wanted the cups gone before the Saturday train brought the first guests up from Exeter.

She remembered the spring Walter sailed for the Falklands run, when the swallows came back the very morning his last letter did not. She had stood on the harbour wall and watched them skim the grey water, one bird dipping low as if testing the tide before the others followed. Now the scraper stopped against the nearest cup, and Quayle looked down at her, waiting for her to say it was only a nest.

'Leave them,' she said. He shrugged and climbed down, and she went inside to set the breakfast table for the lodgers who had not yet arrived. By evening the birds were wheeling over the slate roofs of Gullhaven, quick and low, and she left the front door open so they could find their way in.