Close view of a black-ink traditional-style swallow and rose tattoo on the back of a man's hand and wrist, with his arm crossed over a tweed jacket.

Swallow and rose on a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a tweed blazer and blue shirt crosses his arms, showing a tattoo of a swallow in flight with a cluster of roses on the back of his hand and wrist. The tattoo uses bold black outlines with some shading and no colour. The dark background and soft studio lighting keep the focus on the hand and the ink.

Traditional Hand Swallow Bird Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the scriptorium eaves the same week the damask roses broke, which Brother Osric said was no coincidence and I said was only the weather. He was the cellarer then, a man who measured everything, and he measured the birds too, pacing the cloister each morning to count the mud nests and writing the number in the margin of the almanac.

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That spring he wanted them gone. Novices were arriving from Carlisle with clean hands and clean consciences, and he would not have their vellum spotted. He sent me up the ladder with a broom handle. I went up slowly, and when I reached the third nest a swallow sat on the rim and looked at me with that split-tailed, unbothered face, as if it knew exactly how far south it had flown and what the crossing had cost it. I could not make myself do it.

I came down and told Osric I had knocked three nests and the rest had been lost in the storm. He studied me over his spectacles for a long time. Then he took the almanac, crossed out the figure, and wrote beside it in his crabbed hand: not one lost to me. He never mentioned it again, though each April he asked whether the roses had come on.

Osric died in the winter, and we buried him under the south wall where the roses climb. The swallows were gone by then. When they returned the following spring I stood in the cloister with my arms full of cuttings and watched one dart over the wall toward the sea, straw in its beak, and I thought he would have counted it.