Small black and grey swallow tattoo in flight on the side of a ribcage, shown in a black and white photo with a hand holding fabric and a striped background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in flight on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight with outstretched wings and a forked tail is tattooed on the side of the ribcage. The bird is drawn in black ink with fine outlines and soft shading across the body and wings. The photo is black and white, with the skin lit softly against a striped background and fabric held up by a hand at the top of the frame.

Traditional Ribs Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow came down onto the rail of the Margaret Ann a hundred miles short of Lowestoft, too tired to lift its head, and Cook Pruett swore it had flown all the way from Denmark on one good wing. Nobody argued. We were three days out of Harwich with a cargo of coal and a hold that smelled of wet dog, and a bird that had decided to ride with us was the first good luck anyone had seen since Christmas.

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Pruett fed it crumbs from a biscuit tin and named it after his late mother, which the mate thought was daft. By the second night it had taken to perching on the brass of the wheelhouse door, flicking its forked tail at the wind as though it were keeping time to the engine. The old skipper, Hollis, watched it from the bridge with his pipe unlit and said nothing at all, which in Hollis was a kind of sermon.

When the swell came up on the Friday, the bird went from the door to the mainstay and stayed there, feathers flat, facing the grey water. Hollis took the wheel himself. Somewhere past the Haisborough sands the cloud split and a stripe of low sun lay across the deck like a flag, and the swallow lifted off and went low over the waves, straight for the land, and did not look back.

Hollis said that a swallow never goes ashore to die. He said it was the one thing he had ever been certain of. Then he lit his pipe.