Two forearms with colourful traditional tattoos of roses, swallows, stars and a key, shown with palms facing up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional sleeves with roses and swallows on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Both forearms are covered in bold traditional tattoos featuring yellow and blue roses, pink and blue swallows, stars and a key, with small black characters near the wrists. The linework is heavy and outlined in black, with shading in grey and solid fills of red, blue, yellow and green. The photograph is taken from above with the palms turned up, and the wearer's torso and shorts are visible but the face is not.

Traditional Forearm Hand Rose Swallow Star Key Heart Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the harbour wall the same week the ferry stopped running, and Old Tomas said it was the only honest thing the island had left. He had the fishing boat, the Marigold, with her blue hull gone chalky, and he took me out to the reef on the morning the tide went slack, because a man needs someone to hold the lamp while he pulls lobster pots from the weed.

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The pots were empty, every one. Tomas swore at the sea, then at his own hands, which were spotted and stiff, and he held them up to the grey light the way you'd show a customs man your papers. On the back of one wrist was a rose gone yellow at the petals, and a swallow above it that had lost a wing to age and salt. He told me the rose was for his wife, who had grown them along the wall, and the swallow was for the summer he sailed to Lisbon and back without a single sober night, and the key was for the shed where he kept his mother's letters, which he had never once opened.

We found the key in the bottom of the hold, wrapped in oilcloth, and I think that was the true catch of the day. Tomas turned it over in his palm. Then he laughed, a short, rusted sound, and dropped it into the sea, and the swallows went wheeling over the Marigold as if they had been waiting all along for him to let something go.