Black and white line drawing of a swallow in flight with cherry blossoms and falling petals, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and cherry blossom design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A swallow with outstretched wings flies to the right, with cherry blossom flowers clustered beside its body and a single blossom below. Bold black outlines and solid black areas define the wings and tail, while the bird's body and blossoms are left as open white shapes. Loose petals drift in the upper left, and the plain white background keeps the composition clean.

Japanese Traditional Swallow Bird Cherry blossom Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the swallows came back to the pump house on Tuesday, two of them, and I stood on the forecourt with the hose still running until the water found my shoes. They have no business out here. Forty miles of nothing either side of the highway and they still knew which gutter to choose. Mrs Okafor says they are the same birds that nested over her kitchen in Leeds, and I told her that was rubbish, but I left the bin doors propped open for them anyway.

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The cherry tree you planted by the yard tap the year before you left, I had written it off after the frost. This spring it put out little white flowers, the kind that drop before you can properly smell them. Yesterday the wind lifted a handful across the tarmac and a lorry driver stopped to pick one off his windscreen wiper and asked if we were having a wedding. I said only a funeral for the heat, and he laughed like I had been funny.

I haven't told anyone the swallows had the sense to be somewhere else for the worst of the summer. You wrote that you would be home before the ground cracked. The ground cracked in March. I have kept your room made up and your cup on its hook, and when the birds dive under the awning, flashing that dark blue like someone tearing a page, I count them. Two. Always two.

If you read this in a town with a sea, post me a stamp from it so I know you are near. I'll leave the light on over the pumps. The swallows will find it before you do.