Traditional flash sheet of a swallow, an alphabet, a red rose, two hearts with banners, flowers and nautical stars, drawn in red, green, yellow and black ink.

Traditional flash sheet with swallow and roses

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A flash sheet drawn across two pages, showing a swallow, a blackletter-style alphabet, a red rose with green leaves, and two red hearts with cream flowers and banners. Bold black outlines and solid fills are used throughout, with small black nautical stars in the corners. Paint pots and a brush sit at the edges of the frame, and the colour is limited to red, green, yellow and black.

Traditional Lettering Swallow Alphabet Rose Heart Banner Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow on the flash sheet had been traced so many times that its wing outlines had gone soft as pencil. Ada Brisk kept it pinned above her paint pots in the back room off Coldharbour Lane, because the sailors who climbed her stairs always asked for it first. Two birds for two crossings, they told her. She never once asked which crossings they meant.

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Fenella Strand came in on a wet Tuesday with a folded letter in her glove and asked for two hearts, a banner across them, and a name in each ribbon. Ada mixed the red twice, once bright and once with a little brown, so the second heart would look as though it had been left out in the weather. The cream flowers she painted last, dabbing the petals with a sable brush while Fenella watched the window and the rain running down it.

The letter stayed on the counter the whole time, its seal broken but its edges still tight. Ada glanced at the address only once, a ship's name and a berth number at Millwall, and then she looked at the ribbons and not at the paper again. Fenella paid in coppers and shillings and did not ask for a receipt.

Afterwards Ada pinned a fresh sheet to the wall, drew a nautical star in each corner the way she always did, and left the stars unfilled. They were for the men who had not yet decided whether they were coming home.