Black ink tattoo of a bird and trailing vine with small flowers on the upper thigh of a seated person holding a glass.

Bird and vine tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated person wearing a light denim jacket holds a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, with the lower body in focus. A black ink tattoo of a bird in flight and a thin vine with small flowers runs down the outer thigh. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and grey, set against a blurred green background.

Botanical Thigh Bird Swallow Vine Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the swallow in the hayloft on the first morning of the hard frost, a small dark thing wedged between two bales as if it had been dropped there. Nan always said they were gone by Michaelmas and any stragglers were dead already, so you should have left it alone. Instead you climb the ladder with a jam jar of sugar water, your breath clouding ahead of you in the cold.

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Its left wing is caught in a loop of orange baler twine. You work it free with fingers that have stopped feeling much, and the bird is too tired to bite. Outside, the vine on the south wall of the byre is bare and black, the one Nan took as a cutting from the churchyard wall in Ledbury the year before she died. You tuck the swallow inside your coat against the wool and walk the long way down to the house, past the ewes and the frozen trough, feeling its heart going like a clock wound too tight.

All through February it lives in a shoebox by the range. You soak bread in warm milk and drip it from a teaspoon. Tansy, the old collie, lies with her chin on her paws and watches the box as though it might get up and leave without asking. Once, when the door opens, the bird tries its wing, flutters into the window and drops back into the straw, and you laugh out loud at the kitchen table for the first time since the funeral.

In March you come in from the lambing shed to find the box empty and the back door hanging open on its hinge. You stand in the yard with the cold in your teeth, ready to be angry with yourself. Then you look up. The vine on the byre wall has come into small white flowers overnight, and on the wire beneath them a swallow sits with its head tilted, watching you as if it has been waiting for you to notice.