Black and grey swallow silhouettes tattooed on two inner wrists, with two birds perched on a wire on the left and flying birds on both sides.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow silhouettes on both wrists

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are shown, each with black swallow silhouettes. The left wrist has two swallows perched on a thin wire with a third bird in flight, while the right wrist has two swallows in flight. The shading is soft and dark, with feathered edges, set against plain skin in a simple, even composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the second week of September the wire outside the boarding house kitchen had filled with swallows, forty or fifty of them shuffling along the line like passengers waiting for a late train. Mrs Pell counted them every morning over her teapot and reported the number as if it were the weather. You had come to Saltcombe for a fortnight to finish a letter you had not yet started, and somehow the fortnight had become a month of breakfasts at the long table with the lodgers who never quite left.

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On the first proper gale the birds lifted off together, and the wire sagged and sprang back with nothing on it. You stood at the window with the kettle going cold and felt the particular emptiness of a room after a party. Mrs Pell only sniffed and said they'd be off to the Gambia by Michaelmas, and that the ones who went early were the sensible ones. A sea fret rolled in over the harbour wall, and out of it came a single swallow, sweeping low across the lawn before dropping onto the wire as neatly as a pencil set down on paper.

It sat there alone. You watched it for a long time, long enough to finish the cold tea and start a fresh draft on the back of the rent book. When the fog thinned it was still there, wings folded, facing the open sea.

You posted the letter that afternoon with the stamp slightly crooked, and left the kitchen window open an inch for the bird.

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