Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a swallow in flight beside a sprig of blossom and buds, on the side of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and blossom sprig on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow with outstretched wings is drawn in bold black outline with grey shading along the wings and body. Beside it, a sprig of five-petalled flowers and two closed buds climbs diagonally, rendered in the same black and grey tones. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo filling the frame against soft skin tones and a dark area of clothing at the edge.

Traditional Botanical Neck Swallow Bird Blossom Flower Bud Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Hartwell Crossing turns your passport over twice, as if something might fall out of it. Outside, the rain has stopped, and above the barrier the swallows are stitching the grey air together, dropping low over the tarmac and climbing again. You were told they nest in the eaves of the customs hut every year, and that the guards tolerate the mess because the birds come back to the same mud cups as faithfully as the lorries come back to the same depot.

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He asks what you are carrying. Nothing that needs declaring, you say: a folded letter, a pair of boots, and a sprig of blossom pressed between the pages of a seed catalogue. The flowers have dried to paper, five petals each, the two buds still shut tight. Your grandmother pressed them from the tree in the yard on Rennie Lane the spring before the wire went up, and she made you promise they would reach the far side before the tree forgot what it was for.

"Plant material?" he says.

"Only a memory of a tree," you say, and he laughs, not unkindly, and lifts the catalogue to read a line of it. Something in his face loosens. He says his mother had the same tree on her street in another town, that she used to sweep its petals off the step every April and swear at them. He stamps the page and hands the book back open to the flowers.

You step past the barrier, and a swallow cuts across your path so close you feel the air shift against your cheek. It banks over the hut, heading east, back toward the eaves you have just left, and you watch it until it is only a mark on the sky. Then you tuck the catalogue under your arm, pressed flat, and keep walking.