Black silhouette swallows in flight in a blackwork style, tattooed in a diagonal line across the ribs of a bare side torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying swallows across the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Five solid black swallow silhouettes fly in a loose diagonal line from the upper side of the torso down towards the waist. The birds are rendered as flat, filled shapes with no shading, and their wings are shown at varying angles to suggest movement. The image is shot in warm, low light against a dark background, with only black ink visible on the skin.

Blackwork Ribs Swallow Bird Silhouette Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the pair of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the good oil. You've asked me a hundred times why the birds came down to the sump instead of climbing off over the Spire like sensible creatures. Well. Five of them, that's what the old men counted from the gantry the morning the wind changed. Five swallows, forked tails cut sharp as a tailor's shears, and they weren't going up. They were coming down in a line, one behind the other, like stitches pulled through cloth.

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Nobody in the Low Terraces had seen a swallow in forty years. The glass roofs had seen to that, and the rain off them tasted of copper. So when Ilse Varga, who kept the pump house and nothing else, climbed to the cistern grate with her bucket and saw the first bird skim the black water, she set the bucket down and forgot to pick it up. The bird dipped its beak, lifted, and dipped again. Then the others came, the way water finds a crack.

They'd come from beyond the salt flats, through the gaps the towers left them, wanting only a skim of clean water and a low place to turn. So Ilse cut the grate open with her father's saw, and by dusk the water had a rim of dust and feathers on it, and the five of them sat along the pipe-rail, tails twitching, looking at her as if she'd been the strange thing all along.

Here is the part I keep for the end. In the morning the birds were gone, but the cistern was still clear, and a small black mark sat on the inside of the rail where one of them had perched. Ilse said it was a feather. My mother said it was the flock's mark. I say look down when you drink, and you may see it still.