Colourful swallows with swirls on the ribs
Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo
Two stylised swallows in flight fill the frame, one with outstretched wings and the other with a purple body decorated with orange flowers. Bold black outlines and thin swirling lines frame the birds, with shading and colour blends across the wings and tails. Vivid blue, green, orange, yellow and purple ink dominates against the light skin of the torso, with the design sitting diagonally across the side of the body.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Dear Marguerite,
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The ovens were already roaring when Mr Okonjo's boy came in shouting that the swallows had returned to the chimney on Tanner Street, three days early and half of them ragged from the crossing. I didn't believe him until I went out into the yard myself. Forty birds were wheeling over the slates in the grey before sunrise, blue and green and rust-orange, and one purple bird with orange flowers on its breast dropped straight through the gap in the roof as if it owned the place.
You'll think me soft, but I stopped kneading. Eleven years I have been up at four, and I have never once let the dough sit while I watched something.
Of course the bread went wrong. I left the tins in too long, and the crusts came out dark as old boots. Mr Okonjo said nothing. He tapped one loaf with his knuckle, listened to it like a doctor listening to a chest, then laughed so hard he had to sit down on the flour sacks. "Swallows only come back to a warm kitchen," he said. "Yours was warm enough."
I have kept the burnt loaf on the windowsill. This morning a swallow landed beside it, looked at me sideways, and left a feather the colour of a peacock's throat. I am keeping that too.
Yours, Ada
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