Colour swallow tattoo with a red throat and blue-black wings, set inside a thin black circle on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in a circle on a upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A swallow in flight fills the upper back, with its tail extending down past a thin black circle behind it. The wings are rendered in black and blue with solid fills and some grey shading, while the belly is pale grey and the throat is bright red. The bold outlines and clean, open background give the image a simple, graphic composition against the skin.

Neo-trad Back Swallow Bird Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow stayed on past Michaelmas, which Mrs Hardy said was against nature and her husband said was none of their business. It roosted on the far rafter of the cattle byre, where the heat from the cows rose up and kept it alive through the frosts. Nobody could say how it had missed the road south, only that it had, and that its throat had gone the red of a hot coal in the lamplight.

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Nell, who was nine that winter and had the job of mucking out, climbed the ladder each morning with a fistful of crumbs from the breakfast bread. She talked to it the way her grandmother talked to the hens, low and steady, telling it about the drifts on the lane and the heifer that would not stand up. The bird watched her with one black eye and never once flew at her. By January the ice on the cattle trough was thick enough to hold a stone, so Nell broke a round hole in it each dawn with the handle of the pitchfork.

The thaw came in February all at once, the way it does on the wolds. Nell carried the bread out and found the rafter empty, but the trough hole was still open, a clean ring of black water in the grey. The swallow was circling above it, dropping so low its tail brushed the surface, then climbing again, until it went through the gap in the ash trees and was a dot over the barn roof and gone.

Mrs Hardy said it would not come back. Nell propped the byre door open every evening all the same. In April the swallows returned, and one of them dropped out of the blue and settled on the far rafter as though it had never left. Nell left a crust there that spring and every spring after, and the trough was never allowed to freeze again.