Traditional style tattoo of a swallow in flight over a red heart pierced by an arrow, with the words I'll turn my back and let myself live, on a lower leg.

Swallow, heart and arrow in a traditional banner

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A red swallow with a dark blue wing sits in a circular frame, beside a red heart pierced by an arrow and a small cluster of red flowers. The words I'll turn my back and let myself live curve around the frame in black lettering. Bold black outlines sit over solid colour fills and a green and teal sky gradient, with a flat, clean composition against red brick.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Hollin Dyke the week the bracken turned copper, which Mam said was how you knew the forest had finished with winter. I stood at the edge of the trees with my boots still wet from the ford, the way Tobias had told me to stand. He had promised he would be back before the first swallow. I counted the birds coming over the lychgate and got to nine before I stopped counting.

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Tobias went to the sawmills at Carrow in the spring, with a borrowed coat and a tin of Mam's shortbread. Two letters came, both smudged at the corners and both full of the cold up there. The third time the carter brought no letter at all, only a message that Tobias had taken up with a lamplighter's widow and would not be walking home. I read it on the forge step while Mr Ashby hammered a horseshoe into shape and pretended not to listen.

That evening I took the good bread knife with the bone handle and cut a slice I did not want, then another. Nobody came to tell me what to do. I thought about the heart I had scratched into the willow by the stile, and the little arrow Tobias had whittled for me to shoot at it, and how we had laughed when it fell short. Then I folded the message in half, then in half again, and tucked it into the lining of my sleeve.

In the morning I walked the other way, past the stile and the willow and the rosehips going red along the hedge. A swallow cut a line across the spinney behind me, low and quick. I did not turn round. I turned my back on Hollin Dyke and climbed towards the high pasture, where the wind comes off the moor and asks nothing of anyone.

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