Traditional style sleeve on a man's left arm, showing a swallow, a ribbon banner and a ship, with a script tattoo partly visible on his chest.

Traditional sleeve with swallow and ship on left arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A torso and left arm shown from the chin down, with a full sleeve of traditional style tattoos. The sleeve includes a swallow near the shoulder, a ribbon banner with lettering, a ship and an eye, drawn with bold black outlines and solid fills. Red, green, yellow and blue ink appear across the sleeve, and a script tattoo is partly visible on the chest above a grey printed tank top.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Chest Swallow Banner Ship Eye Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Quill swore the swallow on his shoulder had carried him five thousand miles before he ever paid a tattooist for it, and nobody aboard the Constance Vane was fool enough to argue with a man who had survived the Horn in February. That was the spring we ran short of fresh water off the coast of Brazil, and our second mate, a Cornishman named Pell, began to talk about the eye.

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The eye sat on Quill's forearm, black-ringed and red at the centre, and it was the one thing he would not let anyone touch. He said it had watched a barque go down in the Sound and had never once blinked on the way back. Pell wanted it sold to a Dutch collector in Recife for the price of two casks of water. Quill said he would sooner be thrown over the side with his own ship.

On the thirty-first night the lookout cried a light off the port bow. It was no lantern but a derelict schooner with every sail gone grey, drifting low and silent. Her name had been painted over in blue, and the bones of the lettering read WAS LOST. Quill went across with a lamp and found her hold stacked with clean water barrels and a strip of cloth nailed to the wheel, painted in the same faded hand: NOW I'M FOUND.

We towed her in with the wind behind us. Quill cut the cloth free and nailed it above our galley hatch, and when the crew asked what it meant he only tapped his shoulder and said a swallow always knows the way home, even when the ship has forgotten it.