Black and white photograph of two weathered hands, each with a small black swallow tattoo on the back between the thumb and first finger, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on the backs of hands

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the backs of two weathered hands held out towards the viewer, each with a solid black swallow tattoo in flight. The swallows have bold outlines and simple filled shapes, with a little shading. The image is monochrome and the background is dark and softly blurred, which keeps attention on the hands and the tattoos.

Traditional Hand Swallow Bird Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The swallows came back to the gallery rail on Tuesday, eleven of them, sat in a row like customs men waiting for a boat. I counted them twice from the lamp room with the glass still warm from the morning sun. Mr Pryce from the mainland says they fly four thousand miles to get here, which I don't believe, but then I don't believe much Pryce tells me now that his wife has run off with the Penzance bus driver.

You'll remember Danny had two of them inked across the backs of his hands before he signed on the Ellen Rose. He held them out to Father over the kitchen table as if they were a receipt. Father said a swallow was a sailor's promise that he'd come home, and Danny laughed and said the swallows had never once been as far as Iceland.

The Ellen Rose went out on the twelfth of March and came back on the twenty-third with only her skipper aboard, babbling about a rope and a fog bank. Danny is not on any list I've been sent. I keep the log of the lamp as the regulations ask: the hour it was lit, the weather, the ships seen. Last night I wrote nothing under ships seen, and then, because I am a fool, I drew a small dot beside my own name on the rota, the way Danny used to draw his birds.

The swallows are still on the rail this morning. I've scattered a handful of crumbs on the iron, the way you'd feed a stray. If he's anywhere, I think he'd come in past the point with the first of them. Send me word if Mum sees him first.