Close photo of a colourful traditional swallow tattoo with bold black outlines on the back of a hand, with dark tattoos partly visible on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional swallow on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed across the back of a hand, with its wings spread and its head pointing down to the right. The bird has bold black outlines, with blue wings and back, a red throat and chest, and yellow accents. The background is softly blurred, showing a black and white checkered floor.

Traditional Hand Swallow Bird Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down on the rail off Cape Finisterre with its wings still half-open, as if it had flown the whole of Biscay on one breath, and Cook's boy went for the bucket before anyone told him to. Nobody on the Mary Ellen had seen a swallow that far out. We were four days from land by the reckoning, and the swallow sat on the capstan bar cocking its blue head at us like a clerk checking a ledger.

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Old Hobbs said it was lost and we should let it drown quietly. Mrs Pryce, who kept the galley and the only Bible aboard, said it was a sign and we should feed it biscuit. We fed it biscuit. It ate the crumbs from my palm and then, when the wind backed round to the south-west, it lifted off and went straight for the coast with a stitch of red at its throat, flashing like a coal someone had blown on.

We made Falmouth nine days later with the hold empty and the captain sober, which was a miracle of its own. Three weeks after that, Hobbs came to my lodging with a sixpence in his fist and asked me to get the bird put on him, somewhere he could see it every time he reached for a rope. He said a swallow always comes home, and so should a man who had the sense to feed one.

I went to the shop on Arwenack Street and drew it the way it had sat on the capstan, head down, looking for the way in. The needle stung him all the way to the knuckles. He never once let go of the rail.