Black ink birds in loose painterly strokes with orange wash across an upper arm tattoo.

Birds in flight on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several birds in flight across the upper arm, with wing shapes and heads rendered in bold black ink. Thin sketchy lines and dripping marks cross the design, and soft ochre wash sits behind the birds. The composition runs diagonally down the arm against a plain black background.

Upper arm Bird Wing Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Carrick Holm the same week the nets went up on the north shore, and old Mairi Gunn said that was no coincidence. She said the birds kept a ledger of who had mended their roofs and who had let the eaves fall in. Her grandson Tam thought this nonsense until the spring he found the ink-black wing lying on the slipway, stiff with salt, and nothing else of the bird left to bury.

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He carried it up to the cottage in a fold of sailcloth. Mairi looked at it a long while and then sent him for the pot of ochre she used on the boat's name. She painted the wash on the flagstone by the door, a smear of the colour the sun goes when it sinks behind the Skerries, and laid the wing across it. The paint soaked into the stone and would not come off, however the factor scrubbed at it years later.

The swallows did not come that summer, nor the next. Tam took the boat out alone and fished the far banks, and each evening he came back to find the ochre stain a little darker, as though it were drinking the light off the water. On the third autumn a single swallow sat on the chimney as he came up the path. It looked at him, then at the stone, then dropped off the ridge and went out over the sea in a long black line, low and unhurried, the way a bird flies when it has finished its accounts.