Two black and grey traditional swallow designs on white fabric, each with a ribbon banner reading HIS on the top and HERS below.

Traditional swallow designs labelled his and hers

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

Two versions of a traditional swallow design are printed on white fabric, one above the other. Each bird is drawn in bold black outline with solid black wings, grey highlights and dotted detailing, and sits above a curled ribbon banner. The top banner reads HIS and the lower one reads HERS, set against plain white backgrounds.

Traditional Swallow Banner Bird Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stools in close, the lamp is down to its last hour and I am too old to shout over the pumps. This is the tale of the two swallows of the Marrow Line, and why the galley still keeps two identical bowls, one scratched with a bird and one with another.

Keep reading

A woman called Oonagh Tully drew for a living before the long dark took the feeling from her fingers. She printed a pair of swallows on every bunk sheet in the sleeping decks, because swallows always return to the same eaves, she said, and a ship is nothing but eaves that keep moving. She ran short of ink before she ran short of sheets, so the banners on the last two read only HIS and HERS, and nobody could say which was which.

Then the reclaimer failed for nine days, and the laundry cycle swapped the sheets without asking anybody. Dunmore woke up with the bird that said HERS and Hael woke with HIS, and the two of them spent a whole season arguing over whose bird was whose. Neither would give up a sheet. Then one night Hael noticed that both swallows, whatever their banners said, were flying the same way, nose to the bow window, towards the star-field that never gets any nearer.

So when you hear the hull ring in the small hours, that is the old swallows knocking their wings against the frame, reminding us which way we are headed. The lamp is out now. Mind the step on the way down.