Traditional style colour tattoos on the tops of two feet, showing a swallow over a birdcage and a ring with a diamond, with banner lettering and small flowers.

Swallow, birdcage and banners on two feet

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A pale pair of feet with matching traditional tattoos on the upper foot, with a swallow above a birdcage and a ring with a diamond on the left foot. Black outlines are filled with red, green, yellow, teal and lilac, and banners carry lettering above flowers and an anchor. Small dark lettering is also inked across the toes, and the feet are shown against a plain light background.

Traditional Other Swallow Birdcage Banner Ring Diamond Flower Anchor Lettering Toe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Bottom believed the swallow had come back for the cage. My father swore it came for the ring. He had hung the brass birdcage from the hawthorn by the lych gate the spring after my mother went off with the carter, and every April since, a swallow had dropped out of the sky onto its roof as if it were paying rent. I was nine when I first saw the ring, a plain gold band with a chip of diamond, tucked inside the cage's little door beside his tobacco tin.

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The forest started where the last cottage ended, a dark sweep of beech and bramble the children were forbidden to enter. Wood pigeons kept time in it. Bill Thorne, who ran the forge, said the trees had swallowed a surveyor in 1911 and spat out only his boots. I went in anyway the summer I turned twelve, following the swallow's bright flick between the trunks, and found it had a nest in a hollow under a fallen oak, mud cups stuck to the wood like small bowls of rain.

Beneath the oak lay a tin box with a rusted clasp. Inside were letters tied with string, every one addressed in my mother's looping hand to a man named Peter Hale, and never posted. Among them was a second ring, identical to the first except the diamond had been swapped for glass. I understood then that my father had never been keeping the swallow. He had been keeping the wrong ring, and the bird had known it all along.

I carried the box home under my jumper and set it on the table beside his tobacco tin. He read the first line, folded the page, and said nothing for so long the kettle boiled dry. The next morning the cage stood open on the hawthorn, the swallow was gone, and I never learned whether it had flown south or simply gone on being a swallow somewhere that did not need rescuing.