Black and grey dotwork swallow in flight above a lotus flower tattoo on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and lotus on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight, with its wing spread upwards and tail trailing down, is shown above a stylised lotus flower. The bird and lotus are built from fine outlines, with stippled dotwork shading creating soft grey tones across the wing, petals and leaves. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on bare skin along the side of the ribcage, with a plain background.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Ribs Swallow Bird Lotus Flower Wing Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had counted the swallows twice before the rain came, and both times there were seven, hooked to the broken lintel of the chapel like stitches. The keep had lost its roof in the great storm of her grandmother's girlhood, and nobody in Carrick Hollow had bothered to mend it since. Her brother said the swallows were the only tenants paying rent, which was to say nothing at all, and she told him to mind his manners.

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The moat had silted up to a green bowl, and in the middle of it the lotus had come up from somewhere nobody could name. Her father swore a travelling pedlar had tossed seed from a cart. Mairead thought it had simply decided to stay. Its petals opened in the afternoons, pale and stubborn among the reeds, and when the swallows dipped low over the water to drink, they looked like they were bowing to it.

Late in August the steward came up the causeway with papers and a face like wet slate. The estate was to be sold to a company in Leeds that wanted the stone for a viaduct. Mairead read the letter standing in the gatehouse while the wind moved through the arrow slits. She folded it small and pushed it into her boot.

That evening she waded out with a bucket and a knife, cut the last open lotus at its stem, and carried it up to the chapel. She laid it on the altar stone beside the nest. One swallow came down, circled the flower twice, and went out over the wall toward the hills, the long fork of its tail trailing like a pen stroke that would not quite finish.