Traditional style colour tattoo of a blue swallow with a red chest and yellow accents on the top of a foot, above a tan slip-on shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue swallow tattoo on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a swallow in flight, with blue wings edged in dark outlines, a red chest and throat, a yellow swoosh across the wing, and a black forked tail. The bird is shown in profile, facing right, on the upper foot. The photo is taken outdoors on mulch, with the tan shoe and its metal studs framing the lower part of the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came back to Thornbury Junction the same week the last steam shunter went off to the breakers, and Ferris Dunne, who had run the platform for thirty-one years, swore it was the same bird. You didn't argue. You were nineteen, you had a ticket punch on a lanyard and nothing to do between the 6.12 and the 9.40 but watch the girders above platform two, where she had stuck her mud cup to the ironwork as if the railway had been built for her.

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Ferris said swallows knew the timetable better than the guard. They came when the hawthorn flowered on the embankment and left the day the first frost came off the cutting. He kept a tin of cocoa on the windowsill of the booking office and a folded Gazette on the counter, and each morning he crossed the platform with his brush and nudged the droppings off the edge of the paving, muttering that the bird was a menace and a marvel in the same breath.

In August the chicks grew loud enough to hear over the diesel. Three gaping mouths over the lamp bracket. You stood under them one evening while the signal changed from red to green and the rails hummed, and you realised you had stopped counting the days until your transfer to Leeds. Ferris came out, stood beside you, and said nothing for a long while.

Then the mother dropped out of the rafters, skimmed the length of the platform so low her tail brushed the wet paving, and rose over the signal wires heading for the sea. The cup stayed where it was. Ferris lifted his brush and, for the first time in thirty-one years, left the mess exactly where it lay.

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