Framed traditional-style flash design of two blue swallows, red roses and striped banners with red lettering, displayed on a table.

Traditional swallows and roses flash in a frame

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A framed flash design shows two blue swallows flying around two red roses with green leaves. Two curled white banners carry red lettering, with the legible words TRUE and DEATH, over a black and white striped background. The frame stands on a black tablecloth in shallow focus, with a blurred seaside view and people in the background.

Traditional Swallow Rose Banner Lettering Stripe Bird Leaves

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

The swallows on Ada's flash sheet had been drawn by a man who had clearly never seen a swallow close up, and she loved them for it. Harry Pellow had cut the stencil in the back of the Cutty Wren in Gravesend, the bench gone soft with years of spilt ink, and he swore the pair were a married couple who had quarrelled over a rose and would never settle it. Ada had her own view, which she kept to herself while the gulls screamed over the Thames.

Keep reading

Her father had sailed with the Pellow boy's uncle on the Marigold, out of Wapping, and the uncle had once told her that a swallow tattooed on the chest meant a man had sailed ten thousand miles, and the roses meant he had come home to someone. She asked which rose was for whom. He said the one with the leaves was for the mother and the other was for the sea, and that was why the sea was always trying to get them back.

When the Marigold went down off Harwich the following winter, the bodies came in one at a time over a month, and her father was not among them. Harry Pellow came round with the flash sheet folded in his coat and set it on her kitchen table without a word. The banners were blank. He had not written anything on them yet. Ada took a pencil from the drawer and wrote TRUE across the top curl, then turned the sheet over and pressed the pencil hard enough to tear the paper at DEATH, and left it there for him to finish.