Four swallows in flight

Black and grey · Flash

Four swallows are drawn in different poses, some soaring upwards and others diving, with their wings spread and tails forked. The feathers are rendered with fine hatching and soft grey shading on a plain white background. The arrangement is diagonal, with the birds spaced loosely across the page.

Swallow Bird Flight Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass by the third day, and the coach from Keswick never came. You carried the bread up to the loft because the ostler had gone down with a cough, and that was where you found the swallows, four of them, roosting in the rafters above the straw as though October had never happened. Nobody at the Crooked Lamb liked to say why they had stayed. Old Mrs Gell said a swallow left behind in winter was a soul owed a debt, and she would not let anyone sweep the nests.

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You didn't believe her, but you didn't sweep either. On the fourth morning one lay stiff on the sill, its forked tail fanned out as if it had been caught mid-dive, and you carried it down in your palm to the kitchen where the fire was banked low. Your brother said it was only hunger. The crumbs you had been leaving for them were gone, eaten by the mice, and there had been nothing else to give.

That afternoon the sky cleared to a hard blue, the drifts going pale and shadowed. You opened the loft door and the three remaining birds went up together, spiralling past the beams and out through the gap where the slates had lifted. They climbed in a loose line, then one folded and dropped and rose again, showing off the way they must have done all summer over the mill race.

You stood in the snow until your fingers ached, watching them shrink to specks above the fell. By morning the pass would open, the coach would come, and nobody would remember the birds except you, with a small dead one wrapped in a handkerchief in your coat pocket, meant for the ground once the spring thaw let you dig.