Black and grey fine line swallow tattoo in flight on a person's forearm, with a wristwatch and a plaid shirt sleeve visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the forearm, drawn with fine outlines and soft grey shading on the wings and body. The bird is angled diagonally across the arm, with its tail pointing down towards the elbow. The image is in black and grey, and the blurred background, plaid sleeve and wristwatch frame the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows had been gathering on the wire above Pell's orchard since Lammas, shuffling along it like clerks waiting to be paid. Mabel Tuck counted them each morning before she counted the windfalls, because a count that came out short meant someone had to walk the valley road for a fortnight. There were thirty-one that year, and thirty-one was right, except for the one that sat apart on the cider house ridge with a bent tail feather, which had never once gone down to the wire with the others.

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Her son Ned had found it four summers back, a fledgling in the nettles under the Bramley with a wing folded wrong. His mother splinted it with hazel and thread, and the bird grew up crooked and stayed. Ned named it Sixpence, the only thing on the farm that never cost them a penny. Now the others were lifting off in ones and twos, and he stood at the foot of the ladder insisting that Sixpence could not fly far enough, that it would starve on the ridge when the frost came.

Mabel told him the saying her own mother had given her: a swallow that stays past Michaelmas has made its bargain with the ground, and the ground keeps what it is promised. Ned asked what the ground had been promised. She said nothing she could name, and went back to her sums.

On the last morning of August Ned opened the cider house door and propped it with a bucket. Sixpence dropped off the ridge without a sound, went low over the wet grass, and climbed over the hedge where the wire ran south. Its forked tail drew a fine line under the year. Ned watched until it was a speck and then nothing, and behind him the first Bramley of the season dropped into the grass, ripe and unbruised.