Traditional style swallow with red roses and green leaves tattooed on an upper arm, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight with teal and yellow wings sits between two red roses, with green leaves and small red buds filling the gaps. The bold black outlines, flat solid fills and scale-like feather detail are typical of traditional tattooing. The image is a diptych showing the same tattoo from two near-identical angles against a plain background.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past four the swallow came in through the loading bay, where somebody had wedged the door open with a fire extinguisher. Ruth Kettering watched it travel the length of the corridor in two dips before it found the ceiling. She was at the desk on Ward 9 with a cold mug of tea and half a drug count. Nobody else was awake except a healthcare assistant asleep in the day room with her shoes on.

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Ruth had worked nights for nineteen years and knew the building's noises: the lift bell, the pumps ticking on the drip stands, the sigh of the oxygen lines. A bird was new. It struck the glass panel above the station, dropped, and settled on the fire blanket box with its blue-black back heaving. She fetched a clean sheet, folded it into a cup, and walked towards it slowly, the way her mother had taught her to approach a frightened cat.

The swallow let her lift it. Its feet gripped the cotton and its small eyes were furious. She carried it past Mr Okafor, who was breathing through his mouth, and past the sluice with its pink bar of soap, out to the side door. The sky over the bins had gone the colour of weak squash. She opened her hands. The bird sat for a moment, then rose over the mortuary annex and was gone towards the allotments.

Back at the desk she wrote on the handover sheet, beneath a note about a catheter: Bird in ward, released 04:31. She sat a while with the cold tea and thought about the red roses in the front beds, cut back in March, which would be coming up again soon. Then she finished the count, every number of it correct, and went to check on Mr Okafor.