Small black and grey fine line swallow in flight with faint script above it, tattooed on the side of a person's abdomen above light grey shorts.

Small swallow tattoo on the side of the abdomen

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight sits on the side of a bare abdomen, with a few faint script letters above its wings. The bird is drawn in fine black linework with soft grey shading on its body and wings. The pale skin, light grey shorts and white bedsheet create a soft, low-contrast composition.

Fine line Other Swallow Bird Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the winding house the same week the cage stopped for the first time in a month. My father said birds knew the air was clean before men did, which was his way of saying nothing about the dust. I counted them from the back step of number nine, Ashdown Row, while Mam shook the bedsheets over the yard wall.

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Our Tommy had gone down at fourteen as a trapper's lad, and at nineteen he was a hewer on the low seam under Hollin Moor. He wrote every fortnight in pencil on the backs of wage slips. Each letter ended with the same small swallow drawn in three quick strokes, because as a boy he had believed the birds carried news between the pit and the sea. Mam kept the drawings in the tea caddy, under the good saucers.

The letter that came in March had no bird. There was only one word, pressed so hard the pencil had torn the paper: LIGHT. Mrs Crake from chapel said it meant the roof had come down on the old workings and they had reached him before the water did. I didn't believe her, and I didn't believe Mam when she said it was the same thing.

The next morning a swallow sat on our washing line, watching me peg out the sheets. I took the pencil from behind my ear and drew one on the back of a chapel notice, three strokes, and pinned it to the gate where the men would see it coming up at seven. Two weeks later a letter arrived with a bird at the bottom, a little crooked, as if he had drawn it one-handed.