Five small black swallow silhouettes in a rising line on the inner forearm, with a hand resting against the chin in the background.

Five swallows in flight on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five small black swallows are tattooed in a diagonal line running up the inner forearm, each bird shown in a different flying position. The birds are simple solid silhouettes in black ink with little or no shading. The soft, blurred background is pale and neutral, which keeps the focus on the wrist and the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Harrowmere the swallows came back every spring to the old lighthouse, and every spring the keeper's daughter counted them as they landed on the wire. There were five that year, and the youngest was small enough to fit in a teacup. Her mother said the little one had been born in a storm and would never learn to fly straight, so she kept it in a basket by the stove and fed it crumbs of bread soaked in milk.

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When the basket was empty one morning, the girl followed the tracks of wet feathers down the cliff path to the harbour. There she found the four older birds sitting on the mast of a fishing boat called the Marguerite, and the small one perched on the tiller, looking very pleased with itself. The skipper, a man with salt in his beard and a limp he never explained, said the bird had asked for a ride to the mainland and he had been too polite to refuse it.

The girl stood on the quay with her hands in her pockets. She had never been further than the next island, and the swallows had never been further than the far shore, yet every autumn they went somewhere she could not follow. She understood then that the basket had only ever been a kindness she had told herself. Before the boat pulled away she tore a page from her schoolbook and folded it into a bird, and the wind took it up over the water, where it flew the way a swallow flies, all angles and no hesitation.

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