Colour tattoo of a blue swallow in a loose watercolour style with the script 'you always have to trust' above it, on the side of the ribs.

Blue swallow with script on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A blue swallow in flight is drawn with loose, sketchy black linework and soft blue shading across its wings and body. Above it, the handwritten script reads 'you always have to trust', and watercolour-like splashes of pink, yellow, green and orange spread behind the bird. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribs and the composition is angled diagonally from the lower left to the upper right.

Ribs Swallow Bird Script Quote Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came in low over the Thames barge the morning Dora Pike lost her second mooring line, and nobody on the quay thought much of it until it circled the masthead three times and settled on the gaff like it owned the river. Her husband Ted swore it was the same bird that had nested under the chandlery eaves the spring before, the one with the torn left wing. Dora said swallows did not remember anything but the weather.

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She had painted the words on the transom herself, in the thin white hand her mother used for church notices, and the paint had run in the rain before the first tide. You always have to trust, it said, or near enough. Ted had laughed at the spelling and then gone quiet, because he had been the one to say it first, out on the Medway, with the wind backing and the ropes singing in the blocks.

By the time they reached Gravesend the swallow had left the gaff and was skimming ahead of the bow, dipping through the spray with its tail spread like a pair of scissors. Dora stood at the tiller with her coat buttoned to the throat and watched it go. Pink and yellow light came off the water where the sun broke through, and the bird flashed blue against all of it.

At the lock, Ted tossed the stern line up to a boy on the wall and the boy missed. Dora caught it herself, one-handed, the way she always had, and made it fast. Behind them the swallow turned once over the mud and was gone upriver, and she did not look for it again.