Black and grey swallow tattoo with lace-patterned wings in blackwork style, placed on the side of the ribs.

Lace-patterned swallow on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed on the side of the torso, with its wings stretched wide and its head turned to the left. The wings and body are filled with fine dotted and lace-like ornamental patterns alongside bold dark feather shapes, with some areas of soft grey shading. The image is black and white, with the tattoo centred on bare skin and fabric with a striped pattern at the top and right edges.

Blackwork Dotwork Ribs Swallow Bird Lace Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane was pinning the last border of lace to her cushion when the swallows began to gather on the wire above the old Pennick orchard, forty of them, lined up like notes on a page. Her husband had gone up the top field for the long ladder to reach the late Bramleys, and she had promised herself the edging would be finished before he came back. The pattern was a bird with its wings opened wide, pricked out from her mother's book, and she had never once got its tail right.

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A swallow came in at the half-door and settled on the corner of the cushion, watching the bobbins flick. Her mother had taught her that a bird which comes into a house is owed a fair exchange, so Hester cut a length of linen thread and held it out. The swallow took the thread in its beak and went out over the apple trees. When she looked down at her work, the bird she had drawn in pins and thread had grown a fret of holes and loops across its breast and along its wings, a pattern she had not made and could not have made.

The next August a boy from the Pennick farm brought her a swallow that had fallen against the glass of the dairy window. It was light as a dry leaf. Under one wing she found a single loop of linen thread, knotted twice, the way she always finished a row. She buried the bird under the pear tree and said nothing to her husband about it.

Every late summer since, a swallow has come to the half-door before the first frost and sat on the corner of the cushion while she works. She gives it a thread, and it gives her back a bobbin of its own, wound with feathers, and she has learned to leave the tail unfinished on purpose.