Two solid black swallow tattoos in a traditional style on the inner wrist and forearm, one above the other, with a silver chain bracelet worn beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight are tattooed on the inner wrist and lower forearm, one angled above the other with their forked tails extended. The birds are rendered in bold black ink with solid fills and simple wing detailing, with little or no shading. The skin is pale and the image is in colour only where the silver chain and teal fabric appear at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Wrist Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came down onto the Good Hope's rail forty miles out, two of them, so worn that their wings hung loose as washing. Eli Marr had been counting birds since Easter the way other men counted coppers, and he knew the old saying the skipper liked to spit out: a swallow on the rigging, a sailor who gets home. Skipper Dunn had never once said it kindly.

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The net was coming up heavy, herring silver in the meshes, and nobody on deck looked at the birds except the boy, Sol, who cupped one in his palms and said its heart was going like a clock with the back off. Eli took it from him gently. Its tail forked like a pair of shears, and it looked up at him with an eye like a bead of ink.

That night the wind backed north and the crew argued over whether to run for Skerrow or hold the ground. Eli stood at the wheelhouse door with the bird inside his jacket, feeling it shift against his ribs each time the boat lifted. He thought of the cottage on Quay Lane where his sister kept a lamp burning in the window, and of the promise he had made her that these spring boats would be his last.

At first light he opened his coat on the wet deck. The swallow lifted, wobbled, found the air and went west over the swell, and a moment later its mate came off the rail and followed, both birds skimming low over the water before climbing toward the land. Eli coiled the warp and shouted for the skipper to put her about, and he did not look back at the empty rigging.