Black and grey shaded swallow tattoo with the word Dad in script beneath it, on the inside of a wrist.

Swallow and script word on wrist

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded swallow in flight is tattooed on the inside of a wrist, with its wings and body rendered in soft grey tones. The word Dad is written in a cursive script just below and to the left of the bird. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the photograph is taken close up against a plain, slightly out-of-focus background.

Traditional Lettering Other Swallow Bird Word Dad Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off the moors since six, and by half past eight Mabel Hartley had given up on keeping the bucket dry under the leaking corner of the stall. She lifted the last tray of wallflowers onto the trestle anyway, wiping her hands on the apron that still smelt of his pipe tobacco, and told the empty pitch next door that it could look after itself for once.

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Her father had always counted the swallows. Every spring he stood at the edge of Fenwick Street market with a stub of chalk in his coat pocket and tallied them as they came back under the iron canopy, scratching little strokes on the underside of the ticket board where the customers never looked. Fifty-two, one year. Nine the year her mother left. He said they returned to the same nest, mud and straw glued under the same girder, and that it was the most stubborn thing he had ever seen in a living creature.

Last autumn the council took the canopy down for scaffolding and the nests went with it. Mabel stood in the wet that first April and waited for the birds to circle the sky where the roof had been. They did circle, then they went somewhere else, and she told herself that was the end of it.

On the third Tuesday of May a single swallow came down through the open frame, low and fast, and turned over the wallflowers as if it had an appointment. Mabel reached for the chalk in her pocket before she had thought about it. On the blackboard, beside the price of the bunched sweet peas, she made one small stroke, then another, then stopped and wrote the word out in full, in letters that wandered the way his always had.