Back of a woman with dark hair in an updo, showing a Japanese-style tattoo of a grey swallow among red blossom branches on the upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and blossom on upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her dark hair pinned up and a green fabric draped over one shoulder. A grey and black swallow in flight is surrounded by red cherry blossom branches that spread across the upper back toward the shoulder blade. The linework is bold and the red petals are solid and clearly defined against the pale skin, with a dark plain background behind.

Japanese Back Shoulder Swallow Bird Cherry blossom Blossom Branch Red flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came into the valley every spring, the week the swallows returned to the mill eaves, and the ground was still soft from the thaw when the first wagons turned in off the Thornby road. Old Tobias Crane ran the swingboats and the coconut shy, and his wife ran the tent where people paid a penny to be told what they already knew. Nobody thought much of the swallow that followed the caravans from field to field, dipping over the guy ropes to take moths from the lamp smoke.

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One year a boy named Ned Parry, who had come to mind the donkeys, found the swallow lying in the wet grass below the cherry orchard at Carrow, one wing folded wrong. He carried it in his shirt to the wagon. Tobias said a bird that flew with the fair belonged to the fair and must be mended like a cart axle. Ned bound the wing with a strip of red ribbon from the prize stall and kept the bird on straw in a biscuit tin.

The swallow mended, but it would not leave. Each morning it sat on the cherry branch leaning over the orchard wall and sang until the farmer came out in his nightshirt to shout at it. When the fair struck camp at midsummer, Ned carried the tin back to the tree and opened the lid. The bird flew up into the blossom and did not come down. The petals that fell that night were red where the ribbon had been, the old women said, though nobody had tied anything to the tree.

Tobias never ran the fair after that. He said the swallow had taken the luck of the whole season and left the donkeys to share the rest. Ned grew up to be a joiner in Carrow, and when he married he carried a single branch of blossom into the church, and folk say a swallow sat on the lychgate through the whole service and never once looked away from him.