A small black swallow tattoo on the top of a woman's foot, visible in a full-length mirror selfie of her wearing a grey crop top and striped split trousers.

Small swallow tattoo on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A full-length mirror selfie shows a woman with long blonde hair in a grey crop top and black and white striped wide-leg trousers with a front split, holding a phone in front of her face. A small black swallow tattoo sits on the top of one bare foot, drawn with simple solid linework and no shading. The image is mostly black, white and grey, with a neutral beige carpet and a white distressed mirror frame.

Other Swallow Bird Foot Mirror

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate is already swinging when you reach the top of the allotment path, which means the swallow has beaten you again. You stand with the trowel in one hand and the seed tray balanced on your hip, watching the pair of them stitch through the air above the rhubarb, their forks cutting the light like scissors through paper. Mrs Okonedo next door says they are the same birds that came back to her husband's shed the spring before he died, and that you should not believe a word of it. You believe it anyway.

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You have never liked the shed. It smells of creosote and the long wet winter, and the nest sits in the rafter above the mower like a thumbprint in clay. Last April you swept it out to be rid of the mess, and the swallows returned the following morning to rebuild it, mud beak by mud beak, with a patience that seemed to be aimed at you. By June the nest held four pale eggs and a row of open mouths, and you found yourself leaving the door propped with a brick so they could come and go.

In August the rhubarb bolted and the beans went to string, and you stopped counting days. Then one evening the shed was empty, the nest a bowl of dry grass with a single feather caught in its rim. You stood in the doorway with the brick in your hand and listened. Far off, over the rooftops, a thin chorus was gathering, the birds circling higher and higher before turning south in one loose, spinning sheet.

You kicked the brick aside and let the door swing shut. Next spring, you think, you will leave it open.