Painted design of a swallow in flight with a purple starry body, white dots and a red throat, drawn on textured paper, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple galaxy swallow in flight

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A swallow with its wings spread is shown mid-flight, angled to the left on a sheet of textured white paper. Its body and wings are filled with deep purple and blue washes speckled with small white dots that suggest stars, and its throat is a bright red patch. The soft, painted shading is set against a plain paper background with a blurred splattered painting at the top right.

Neo-trad Swallow Bird Galaxy Star Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, and sit where the lamp can't blind you. Now. Every September my grandfather swore the swallows left Gannet Head by the same night, and he'd stand on the gallery with his pipe going out in the wind, counting them off against the stars. He said a swallow flying south over open water is a navigator with no map, so it must carry the sky inside itself.

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The autumn of the great fog, a swallow came in through the lamp room glass, dropped onto the brass rail like a thrown knife, and lay there with its red throat going up and down. My grandfather didn't reach for it. He'd learned that much. He sat on the floor and waited, and while he waited the fog outside turned the beam to milk, and he saw that the bird's wings were not black at all but deep violet, pricked all over with white, as if someone had spilled the night sky onto them and let it dry.

When the fog lifted near dawn, the bird opened its wings, tipped its head at the window as if it had been asked a question, and went out over the rocks. Some say it was a hatchling of the Milky Way that had lost its road. My grandfather said only that it had found its bearings by looking at him, which is the one thing a keeper ought never to forget: a light is only useful if something out there can see it.