Traditional style tattoo of a black and grey swallow carrying a branch of pink blossom, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow carrying a blossom branch on the back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A swallow in mid-flight with outstretched wings and a forked tail is shaded in black and grey, with bold outlines. It holds a thin branch with several pink blossom flowers and buds, which are filled with red and pink ink. The design sits on smooth skin against a softly blurred background, with the swallow on the left and the blossom branch trailing to the right.

Traditional Back Swallow Bird Cherry blossom Blossom Branch Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down the salt road in the third week of the dry wind, when the carters had stopped talking and the mules walked with their heads low. It was small and dark-backed, and it carried a thin grey branch in its beak with pink blossom still open on it. Nobody in Ammar the well-digger's caravan believed it had come from anywhere near.

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At the town of Hollin Wells there was one tree left, a fig, and it had given nothing in two summers. The people had sold their goats and then their doors. Ammar's daughter Nadia, who was nine and did not believe in birds, sat on the water trough and watched the swallow circle the fig three times before it landed on the dead top branch. It set down its blossom and looked up at the sky as though it expected an answer.

The old woman who kept the weights at the market said the bird was a messenger from the hill orchards beyond the salt flats, where the blossom never failed. Her grandson said it was only a bird that had lost its way. Nadia said nothing. She climbed the fig, which was not allowed, and tied the branch to a bare limb with a strip of her red headscarf. By evening the swallow had gone and the wind had turned.

Nobody could say whether the fig flowered because of the blossom or because the rain came that week, as rain does in the desert, once in a long while and without asking. But in spring the fig put out leaves around the red cloth. Nadia, grown now, still ties a strip of red to the first branch that greens each year, and the carters who pass through Hollin Wells say the swallow came for the fig, and that the girl was only quicker.