Black fine line tattoo of five swallows in flight on a woman's ribs, photographed from the side with her arm raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five swallows in flight on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Five small black swallow silhouettes fly in a loose diagonal group across the side of the ribcage. The birds are rendered as simple solid shapes with no shading, set against bare skin. The image is in colour, but the only ink is black, with a plain light background and a dark cloth held at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Swallow Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley stove had gone out again by the time Mags Tolliver reached the last of the biscuit tins, and the swallows she had painted on the bulkhead above the hatch were the only thing in the Maid of Lerwick that still looked cheerful. Five of them, pencilled first with a carpenter's chalk, then gone over in tar-black paint by a boy named Ewan who had been apprenticed to the rigger and was too young to be trusted with anything else. They flew from the coal bunker toward the stern lantern, crooked and quick, as if they had somewhere better to be.

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Nobody aboard had asked her why she bothered. Captain Ross said the sea had no use for birds, and the cook said swallows meant a ship was near land, which was a fine thing to say when the land was a week south and nobody had seen a gull in a fortnight. But when the squall came off the Faroes and the cargo shifted and two men went over the rail, Mags stood at the bulkhead with a rag in her fist and counted the swallows twice, the way her mother had taught her to count the children at the school gate.

They came into Leith on a grey Tuesday with the hold half empty and the crew thinner than they'd left. Ewan climbed up to the galley the morning they tied up and found the bulkhead scrubbed clean, every bird gone, only a faint ghost of chalk where the first lines had been. Mags was sitting on an upturned bucket with the coffee pot in her lap. She pointed at the open hatch. Outside, a real swallow was skimming the harbour wall, dropping low over the water and rising again, five beats, then gone.