Colour tattoo of a black swallow filled with red, orange and yellow roses and green leaves, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow filled with roses on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A swallow in flight is drawn in solid black silhouette, with its wings and tail filled by roses, leaves and buds in red, orange and yellow. A large orange rose sits in the bird's body, with smaller blooms along the wings. The tattoo is shown from behind on the upper back, with the bird angled diagonally toward the shoulder.

Traditional Botanical Back Swallow Bird Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the church bell had decided whether to ring, Agnes Hollin was already at the oven, raking the embers into a heap with the long iron paddle. The bakehouse smelt of wet flour and the last of the winter wood. Each morning a swallow came in under the half-open shutter and sat on the rim of the proving trough to wait for her.

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Nobody in Thornbury had seen where it nested. It was black as the flue, and when it flew the light caught the petals it carried in its beak: red from the Dunmore hedge, orange from the tithe garden, yellow from the ditch by the mill. Agnes said the bird was paying rent. She gave it a crust dipped in milk, and it went out again without a word of thanks, which she considered fair.

One January the frost split the rose bushes all down the lane, and the village went hungry for colour as much as for bread. The swallow came every morning anyway, but now it brought nothing. Agnes baked a honey loaf with the last dried hips from her tin and set it on the sill. The bird ate, then flew the length of the lane and came back with its wings and tail so loaded with blossom that it could barely clear the shutter.

The frost lifted in March, and the lane was red again. Agnes never found out which garden had lost its roses to the bird, and she never asked. She kept the sill clear every morning after that, and the bread was always warm by the time the shutters went up.