Small traditional-style blue swallow tattoo with red accents on the back of a person's neck, with dark hair visible around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue swallow on the back of the neck

Traditional · Neck · Colour · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the side of the back of a neck, with its wings raised and its forked tail extended to the right. The design uses bold dark outlines with blue shading on the body and wings, and touches of red on the wing edges and throat. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against pale skin, with dark hair and a dark top softly blurred behind it.

Traditional Neck Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the ladder in Hollis's orchard with a bucket hooked over your wrist, and the wasps are working the windfalls below you as if they have a quota to fill. It is late August and the light has gone thin and gold at the edges. On the telegraph wire beyond the hedge the swallows sit in a row like stitches, chattering and shuffling, and you know without being told that they have started the count. Grandmother used to say you could set your clock by them. When the wire fills, the birds are going south, and the year goes with them.

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Mr Hollis calls up that the Discovery apples won't keep past Tuesday, so you pick faster, dropping the good ones into the sacking and kicking the bruised ones into the long grass. One bird keeps peeling off the wire and looping back over the trees, not quite gone, a blue flash with a rust-red throat and a tail forked like a pair of shears. Each time it passes it dips low enough for you to see the dark line of its back, and each time it seems to check whether you have followed.

On Sunday the wire is bare. You stand in the lower field with the last crate on your hip and the hedge gone quiet, and the only sound is the drone of wasps in the fallen fruit. Then something cuts past your ear, close and fast, and you have to set the crate down to watch it climb over the orchard and away toward the coast, where the ships are, and whatever the birds know about the way.

You pick a blue feather out of the grass by the gate, no bigger than a fingernail, and tuck it into your apron pocket. Mr Hollis will want the crates loaded before dark. You take your time anyway. Some of the ones who leave are only doing what the wire tells them, and some come back to see who stayed.