Black traditional-style swallow design with a sunburst and wavy lines, printed on a grey t-shirt laid flat on a wooden background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional swallow with sunburst and waves on a grey

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black swallow in flight is drawn with bold, solid linework, with spiky rays behind it and three wavy lines below. The design is printed in black on a heather grey t-shirt, which is laid flat on a dark wooden surface. The composition is centred on the shirt with no body or skin visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down to the river every evening the year the gas lamps failed, and the lightermen learned to wait for her before they cast off. She skimmed the black water between the piers of London Bridge, low enough to wet her wings, and where she turned the sun seemed to flare up from under the surface, though the sun had been gone an hour. Old Harriet Quay, who kept the ferry steps at Rotherhithe, said the bird was a dead sailor's wife come back to see that the tide was honest. Nobody argued with Harriet.

Keep reading

Tomas Marr did not believe in drowned wives. He believed in coal barges and the price of tallow, and he believed that a man who waited on a bird was a man who would miss the last lighter out to Greenwich. So one night in November he pushed off without her. The river ran fast and grey under the fog, and somewhere past the Isle of Dogs the swell lifted the boat in long rolling ridges, and he heard the oars knock on something that was not wood.

He put his head down and rowed. When the fog thinned he saw the swallow ahead of him, turning in a tight circle over a stretch of rippling water where a loose mooring chain had snagged a child's rowing boat. The child was Peggy Ash, who had been looking for her brother. Tomas got her out with the boat hook and a good deal of swearing. Afterwards the bird was gone, and the river was only the river again.

The next evening he stood on the ferry steps with his cap in his hands, and she came down over the water, and he did not look away this time.

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