Black and grey traditional style tattoo of two swallows in flight on the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Two swallows on the upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight are tattooed on the upper back of a person with light hair falling over the top left of the frame. The birds have bold outlines, with shading on their wings and bodies and long forked tails trailing behind them. The composition is black and grey against pale skin, with one swallow angled up to the right and the other lower left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The packet boat Marigold Rose had been three days out of Falmouth when the wind turned against us, and Old Haddow swore the swallows had come to tell us so. They came off the grey water in twos, low and fast, skimming the rail as if the sea were a field they meant to mow. Nobody on deck liked it. Swallows go inland before a blow, everyone knew that, so their being out here meant the land had given up on us.

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It was Tamsin, the cook's girl, who counted them. She stood at the bow with flour still on her wrists and said there were two that kept breaking off from the flock and circling back to the ship, one always a little ahead of the other. Haddow said that was only what swallows did. She said no, it was what a pair did when one of them was lost and the other wouldn't leave without it.

We lost the top-sail that night and the mainmast creaked like a cart on a hill. In the grey before dawn, when I was sure we would all go down, I looked up and saw the two of them perched on the yardarm, tails forked and trembling, their wings folded tight against the spray. Neither one flew off. By noon the sea had laid down its temper, and by evening we were tying up at Penzance with the sun on the harbour wall.

Tamsin married the carpenter from the Bristol run the following spring. She still tells anyone who will listen that the swallows were only sheltering, and she never once says who it was that kept whose company.

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