Black and grey traditional tattoo of two swallows over a sun with rays and a flower, on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows and a sun on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight sit over a solid grey sun disc with radiating black rays, with a small flower below them. The bold outlines and simple solid black fills are typical of traditional linework, with grey tones used for the shading on the wings. The tattoo covers the back of the hand, and the plain background is a red top and dark surface.

Traditional Hand Swallow Sun Ray Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Saltmarket for nineteen days when the stallholders stopped pretending it would ease. Mrs Honor Pell kept her cabbages under sacking and her temper under her shawl, and every morning she looked up at the eaves of the wool hall, where the swallows had nested for as long as anyone could remember. The children called the pair Tallow and Pim. They had never once been known to stay so late into the wet.

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One grey morning the swallows did not go up to the hills with the others. They sat on the wet rail above the eel stall and chattered at each other until the eel man threw a fish head at them, which they ignored. Honor heard them say, plain as a kettle, that the sun was hung on a nail on the far side of the cloud, and that nobody had the wit to fetch it down. Then they were gone into the grey, two dark stitches pulled through cloth.

They came back at noon with their wings singed white at the tips and their throats hoarse. In Tallow's beak was a single ray of light, thin as a fishbone, and Pim carried another. They laid them on the cobbles at Honor's feet, and the rays spread out like a fan, black-edged and solid, and where they touched the stones the puddles went to steam. The sun itself came after them, a round grey disc that slid down the sky like a dropped coin and settled above the wool hall, where it still hangs.

The swallows flew south at the back end of the year, and nobody saw them go. Honor's cabbages dried out that autumn. The wool hall keeps a stone disc above its door now, its rays cut sharp, and the stallholders say the market never gets rained on at noon on a Tuesday, though none of them can say why.