Small black and grey fine line swallow in flight with the words stand by me beside it on a forearm.

Swallow and stand by me on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is drawn in fine black linework with stippled shading across the wings and body. The phrase stand by me is written in small lowercase lettering beside the bird. The black and grey tattoo sits on a pale forearm against a soft, blurred background with a tattoo machine visible at the top.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Swallow Bird Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, same as the rest of us. Sit where you can see the rigging. You want to know about the Swallow? Everyone in the county knew her, though by that last summer there were more folk on the grass outside the tent than under the canvas, sitting on their own deckchairs and listening to the brass band through the walls.

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She flew from the high platform at the north end, forty feet up, with nothing but chalk on her palms and the moor wind coming through the open flap. Her partner was Tomas Varga, who had hands like coal shovels and a voice as soft as a tea towel. He caught her every night at the same moment, the same half-second before she would have hit the net. Nobody ever saw him hesitate. Folk thought the flying was the miracle. It was the catching.

Then his wrist went, in the spring, on a wet bar in Preston. The doctor said months. The manager said the show would go on with a replacement from the Dutch troupe, a boy of nineteen who smiled too much. The Swallow said nothing. She climbed to her platform on the last night of the season, and when the drum roll came she looked down, not at the boy waiting below her, but at Tomas, sitting on an upturned crate by the ring with his arm strapped to his chest.

She didn't fly. She sat on the bar with her legs dangling until the whole tent had turned to watch her, and then she called down, clear as a bell, "Stand by me, Tomas." He stood. Nobody had told him to. He got up off that crate one-armed and walked under her, and she let go. Afterwards, when the tent was struck, the boy from Rotterdam found a single chalk print on the bar, the shape of a bird's wing, and nobody has ever had the heart to wipe it off.