Traditional flash design of two swallows, one with yellow and purple flowers and green leaves, the other pierced by a dagger, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows with flowers and a dagger

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The design shows two swallows in a bold traditional style. The upper swallow is purple with a red breast and is surrounded by yellow and purple flowers, green leaves and curling swirl lines. The lower swallow is blue with a red head and gold detailing, and a dagger pierces its body with red drips below.

Traditional Swallow Bird Dagger Flower Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife on Gannet Rock had two swallows that came every spring through the broken shutter of the lamp room. The first was gentle and brought yellow primroses up from the cliff path, which she tied with thread to the rail. The second was quarrelsome and blue as deep water, and it flew with a knife through its body, because a fisherman at Porthkerran had thrown it at the bird for stealing his bait.

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Nobody on the rock could say how the blue one had lived. Its wings still beat, and it still carried messages from the mainland, folded small and tied to one leg. In the bad autumn, when the fog came down thick for nine days and the boats stayed drawn up on the shingle, the blue swallow flew out into it three times, and each time it came back with a slip of paper saying the tide was turning and the men should wait.

The keeper's wife kept the lamp lit and counted the red drips that ran from the wound. The primrose bird sat on the rail beside it and sang nothing, which was its way. On the ninth morning the fog lifted like a sheet off a line, and a boat came round the point with every man alive in it.

They still say the knife is in the blue bird, and that is why it flies so low over the water. Ask any child on that coast and they will tell you the flowers are for the ones who stayed ashore. The lamp is lit at dusk, and the swallows come in before it.