Black and grey swallow tattoos flying in a line up the outside of a foot and ankle, shown in a fine line and silhouette style.

Flock of swallows on a foot

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A foot resting on a dark leather surface shows a line of six swallows, decreasing in size as they travel from the ankle down towards the little toe. The two largest birds have shaded wings with visible feather detail, while the smaller birds are solid black silhouettes with simple outlines. The image is taken straight on with even lighting, and the ink is entirely black and grey against the skin.

Fine line Realism Ankle Swallow Bird Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first swallows came aboard off Spurn Head, six of them, so spent they didn't bother with the rigging and dropped straight onto the galley step as if someone had laid it out for them. I was scraping the porridge pan when Tom shouted from the hatch that the birds had come to us. Nobody on the Brenda Vane had ever known a swallow want to be indoors.

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The biggest went first, folding its wings like a man shaking out a wet coat, then the others in a long descending line, each one a little smaller than the last, until the littlest came tumbling over the coaming and nearly missed the step altogether. I crumbled ship's biscuit onto the tiles and they ate it without looking at me. Ezra the bosun swore they were carrying luck south from the Humber. I told him a flock is only the same birds rearranged, and he laughed at me for a fool, which I was.

By morning the five big ones had gone off east over the grey water. The littlest stayed, puffed up on my boot toe, refusing the biscuit. I kept it in an empty cocoa tin by the range and dipped bread in tea to feed it from a teaspoon. On the third day it hopped onto my palm, considered the stove, then launched itself at the open hatch so steeply I thought it would hit the mast.

I wrote it in the log that evening, under the tide and the wind: one swallow, gone ahead to catch the others. Ezra read it over my shoulder and said nothing, which from him is a kind of blessing. The step is clean now. I still scrape the pan slowly, listening for wings.