Black ink fine line tattoo of a swallow flying out of an open birdcage with script lettering above it, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Swallow leaving a birdcage on the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow flies out through the open door of a birdcage, with the script words Pop Pop written above the cage. The linework is fine and even, with light grey shading on the bird and a small decorative base under the cage. The tattoo is shown in black ink on a close crop of the upper back, with the wearer's pink top visible at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Shoulder Swallow Birdcage Bird Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Fenwick had not opened the top floor rooms since the winter the chimney fell, so when a swallow came in through the broken skylight of Seaview House, she left the birdcage on the landing where it had hung since her husband died, its little door propped wide, and said nothing to the lodgers about it.

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The lodgers were three: a quiet schoolmaster from Leeds who paid in advance, a widow who kept a shawl over her birdless window, and a boy named Tommy Hale who was nine and had been sent to the coast to get his chest right. Tommy taught the swallow to sit on his knuckle. He called the old man in the photograph on the stairs Pop Pop, because that was what he had been told to call him, and because the old man had once taught him to whistle through a blade of marram grass.

By September the swallow was restless. It flew the length of the landing, out through the skylight and back again, always returning to the cage. Ada watched from the kitchen door and thought of her husband's tin of wedding buttons, and how he used to say a bird that comes back has nothing left to prove.

On the last morning of the month the boy's mother arrived in a hired car, and Tommy carried the cage down the front steps himself, holding it level as if it were full of water. At the sea wall he tipped it gently and lifted the latch. The swallow sat on the bars a long moment, then went low over the harbour and out towards the grey line of the Channel, and Tommy stood waving until there was nothing left to wave at.