Black and grey fine line swallow tattoo with geometric circles and triangles across the back of a hand.

Swallow tattoo on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed across the back of a hand, with its wings spread and tail forked. The fine, precise linework is shaded with hatching, and circles and triangles are overlaid on the body and wing. The image is a black and white photograph against a dark textured fabric, with a thin ring on one finger.

Fine line Geometric Hand Swallow Bird Circle Triangle Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had no use for birds in the scriptorium, and said so each spring when the swallows dropped feathers onto the vellum he pinned to the sill. He swept them off with the flat of his hand. Then one March the swallow that had nested above the lectern did not return to its old mud cup. It built a new one at the far end of the roof, where the slates met the gutter, and the brothers said this was a bad sign.

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Anselm climbed up with brass dividers and a pot of ink, meaning only to measure the spot for the ledger. He sat on the leads for the length of a psalm and found the bird did not fly in a line. It swung out over the orchard in a wide loop, folded its wings back into a point, and dropped through a circle of air no bigger than the chapter house door before rising again. He drew the forked tail, which opened like shears, and the long wings that made a triangle against the sky. Each time he got one curve true, the bird undid it.

By Holy Week he had forty sheets and none of them was the swallow. Sister Ysolde, who kept the herb garden and could not read Latin, climbed the ladder one evening and looked over his shoulder. "You draw it as if it were going somewhere," she said. "It is only coming home." On Easter Monday he put the dividers in his sleeve, stopped measuring, and drew the circle the bird made around the bell tower each time it came back. When it dropped through the ring into the mud cup, he wrote the date beneath and shut the book.