Traditional flash drawing of two swallows with red flowers and green leaves, one carrying a heart and the other an envelope, shown on cream paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows with a heart and envelope

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Two black and grey swallows with red and grey-shaded wings fly across the sheet, one carrying a red heart and the other a small envelope with a heart seal. Each bird sits above a pink five-petal flower with black centres and green leaves. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills in red, pink, green and grey give the design a classic traditional look on a cream background.

Traditional Swallow Heart Envelope Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the swallows came back to the sorting office at Porthkennack, and every spring Mabel Trewin shooed them off the parcel shelf and let them stay anyway. They built under the gutter above the hatch where the post came in, and by June there were always two of them, one black-backed and quick, the other a shade slower in the turn, as if she had a letter in her beak and wanted to be sure of it.

Keep reading

The summer Mabel turned fifty-one, a letter arrived for Eli Crane at the lighthouse, addressed in a hand she knew from the Sunday school register. She had not written to him in thirty years. The envelope was sealed with a red wax heart pressed with a thimble, and she held it up to the light from the hatch for a long while before she let it go on the sorting tray.

The swallows took the reply. Mabel wrote it on the back of a rate card, folded it twice, and sealed it with the same thimble and a bead of red wax she had been saving since her wedding. Then she opened the hatch and the birds went out over the harbour wall, low over the boats, one of them dropping a feather as she banked past the lighthouse steps.

Eli was on the rocks when they came down. He did not open the envelope at once. He sat with it on his knee and watched the swallows circle back up to the eaves, and Mabel, behind the glass, pretended to sort stamps until the gulls had stopped shouting.