Pencil sketch of a swallow in flight with wings spread and a long forked tail, shaded in soft greys, shown as a tattoo design on a plain background.

Swallow in flight design

Black and grey · Flash

A swallow is shown in mid-flight, with one wing raised high and the other swept down, and a long forked tail trailing below. The linework is soft pencil with feather detail on the wings and shading along the body and underwing. The image is black and grey on a plain white background, with the bird centred and filling most of the frame.

Swallow Bird Flight Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the 7.14 was late again, so I have had time to finish this on the back of the timetable, which Mr Pryce says I am not to deface. The swallows have started nesting under the canopy above platform two. Three pairs this year, and the old pair who come back to the same iron bracket every April, the way they did when we were children.

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You asked in your last letter whether I still go down to the signal box on Sundays. I do. Dad's tin of sandwiches is still on the shelf beside the bent lever key, and yesterday I watched a swallow come through the open window, dip under the signal wire, and shoot out over the goods yard with its long tail forked behind it like a pair of scissors cutting the air.

The lad at the ticket office says they will be gone by September, south over the Channel, and that they return to the same barn every spring because they never forget the way. I told him that was nonsense, that birds remember nothing but hunger and weather. He said his nan would have something to say about that. I have decided to believe his nan.

So here is the arrangement. When the train pulls out on Thursday with you in the third carriage, I will be standing where I always stand, by the milk churn. Don't wave. Just look up at the canopy. If there is a swallow over the rails, you will know I am still here, and the fare to Penzance is no excuse for not writing back. Yours, as ever, Bea.