Two traditional style swallow tattoos on the upper back of a person wearing a white lace top with a scooped neckline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two swallows in flight sit side by side on the upper back, drawn with bold dark outlines and filled with blue and red. The white lace top has a scooped neckline that frames the tattoos. The photograph is a close view from behind, with the back filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the harbour wall the week the Maud Erskine was towed in with her mast gone and her crew sulking on the quay. Old Tobias Quill said they always knew when a boat was done for, and he said it loud enough for the coastguard lad to hear. He had flown the same two birds on his own shoulders since 1952, blue and red and dark-lined, and he swore they had carried him home from more storms than the boat ever had.

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The lad asked him, plainly, whether swallows could navigate a gale. Tobias laughed until he coughed and said a swallow could find a dry barn from the bottom of the Atlantic if it had the sense to be frightened. Then he told him about the night off Lundy when the wheel jammed and the fog came down thick as wet wool, and how the birds had dipped and flickered ahead of the bow through the grey, always just far enough to see, never so far they were lost.

The next morning the lad found a pair of swallows painted on the Maud's transom, fresh and crooked, with a note tucked under the tiller in careful capitals: FOLLOW THE RED ONE. Nobody in the harbour ever admitted who had done it. Tobias only shrugged and said the birds had done the navigating, as they always did, and that the boat would sail again by the spring tide.

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