Black and white photo of a bare foot on a rail, with a fine line swallow tattoo on the ankle and top of the foot.

Swallow tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and lower leg step along a steel rail in a black and white photograph, with the background of railway sleepers softly blurred. A small swallow in flight is drawn in thin black linework across the ankle and top of the foot. The tattoo is in greyscale, and the composition places the foot centrally against bright, overexposed sky.

Fine line Ankle Swallow Bird Foot Ankle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last cage came up at six, and the swallows were already out over the sidings, dropping low across the rails as if they were measuring them for someone. Nobody in Coldharbour thought this strange. The birds had always known the line better than the men did.

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The winter the roof came down in Number Four, Tom Haddow was nine and walked the rail to the tunnel mouth every evening, because his mother would not let him near the shaft. He kept to the steel, the way his father had taught him to keep off the wet ballast, and a swallow kept pace with him from the water tower to the portal. It always flew a few yards ahead, then turned back at the end as though it had counted the sleepers.

Mrs Pryce in the signal box said it was the bird carrying news. Tom said nothing to that. He only waited on the rail each evening, and each evening the swallow came down and sat on the iron by his feet, looking into the dark of the tunnel, and then it flew in and out again.

On the ninth night the rescue lamps came up the line from the far side, and the swallow went in ahead of them. When Tom's father walked out at dawn, grey with dust and blinking at the light, the bird was sitting on the rail just where the boy had stood. Nobody moved it. It lifted off when the first train whistled.