Traditional tattoo of two swallows above and below a LIVE FREE banner, with yellow flowers, on the upper arm.

Two swallows and LIVE FREE banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two swallows in flight frame a red banner reading LIVE FREE, with yellow five-petal flowers and green leaves at the sides. The birds have bold black outlines, black and grey wings with yellow highlights, and red chests, with solid fills and simple shading. The tattoo sits on the outer upper arm against a dark top, shot straight on in even light.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first swallow came to the road out of Tenmile Wells the spring the water tanks went dry, and it found the lorry driver Ada Crane asleep against her tyre with her hat over her face. It did not wake her. It sat on the wing mirror and waited, the way swallows do, until she felt the weight shift and lifted the hat to see what had landed on her.

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"You're a long way from the sea," she said. The swallow tilted its head east, where the road ran on into the heat, and then west, where the sun was sinking behind the mesa.

Ada had been told that the birds of the desert flew only to the places where somebody was still hoping. She did not believe it. She believed in diesel and the spare can in the back. But she tied a strip of red cloth from her grandmother's apron to the mirror, and the second swallow came the next morning, and the two of them flew ahead of the truck all the way to the pass.

At the top of the pass the road gave out into gravel and a white line of salt. The swallows circled once and then dropped low, one on each side of her windscreen, so close she could see the rust-coloured flush on their throats. She stopped. The ribbon the birds carried unfurled and hung in the wind, and it read, for anyone who cared to look, LIVE FREE. Ada laughed until she had to wipe her eyes, then turned the wheel and drove on, the birds keeping pace until the road finally reached the sea.

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