Black and grey traditional tattoo covering a man's chest and stomach, with a woman in a headdress, roses, a skull in a heart and an anchor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional chest and torso piece with woman and anchor

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless torso covered from chest to waistband by a large traditional tattoo. The central motif is a woman's face in a headdress framed by roses, above a skull within a heart, arrows, swallows and an anchor. The work is built from bold black outlines and grey shading on the skin, with a red waistband visible at the bottom of the frame.

Traditional Chest Other Woman Headdress Rose Skull Heart Arrow Swallow Anchor Ship wheel Chain Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Hollow Wharf on the third Tuesday of April, the same as they always had, and Nan Pryor took it as a sign the sea had finished with her son. Hal had been gone nine years on the Marigold Rose, a collier that ran coal from Blyth to Lisbon and sometimes further, and nobody in Porthgarrow expected him back on any particular tide. She kept the kettle on the back ring anyway and hung his good coat on the hook by the door, where the damp could get at it.

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The knock came after dark. A man stood on the step with a sea bag over one shoulder, and when he took off his cap he asked whether the anchor on the chapel wall still had its chain, because he had promised a dead man he would check. He said the Marigold had gone down off Ushant with all hands but him. Nan asked him to say that again, slower, and he did, and she found she had to hold the door frame.

Hal had not gone down. He had jumped ship at Lisbon with a bosun's debt and a ring he had no right to, and he had written once, from a port she could not pronounce. The stranger, whose name was Teague, had come to settle what the letter left unsaid. He stayed three nights, mending the gate hinge and eating her fish stew without speaking much, until on the fourth morning he laid a small brass swallow on the table, worn smooth at the wings, and said Hal had asked him to bring it home if the sea let him.

Nan turned the swallow over in her palm and said nothing for a long while. Outside, the birds were stitching the eaves together with mud and straw, going about their business as if none of it mattered. She took down the good coat, folded it over the back of a chair, and set out a second cup. Teague watched her do it and understood he was staying for supper.