Black and grey hatched drawing of a swallow in flight with swept wings and forked tail, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in flight, engraved line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A swallow is shown in side view, flying to the right with its wings swept upward and its forked tail spread. The bird is built from dense cross-hatching and fine parallel lines that model the feathers and shade the underside of the body. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with the bird centred and filling most of the frame.

Swallow Bird Flight Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the harbour wall the same week the Marguerite's hull was caulked, and Tomasz swore they were the same birds that had left in October, though nobody else on the quay could tell one from another. He sat on an upturned crate with a tin of tar at his feet and watched them skim the grey water, wings swept back like the blades of a clasp knife, forked tails opening and closing as they turned.

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"Bad luck to see them before the boat's afloat," said old Brannigan, who had not been to sea since the war and never let anyone forget it. "Means somebody goes over the side."

"Then it'll be you, and I'll have the cabin," Tomasz said, and Brannigan laughed hard enough to set his cough going.

The Marguerite went out on the evening tide with a cargo of salt fish and one stowaway swallow that had nested in the rigging and would not be shifted. Somewhere past the Scilly light it flew off to the east, low and fast, and Tomasz lost it against the dark line of the swell. He kept his eyes on the place where it had gone until the mate called him to the wheel.

Three weeks later they tied up in Rotterdam with the hold empty and the men counting their wages. On the gangway a girl with a paper bag of pears asked the captain whether the ship had seen the bird with the long tail. Nobody had. But the mate, a quiet man from Fowey, pointed up at the crosstrees, where a single swallow sat preening, and said it had never been any farther than the next port.