Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the inner wrist, shown in outline with soft grey shading across the wings and body. The bird faces left with its wings raised and its forked tail extended. Pale pink roses and green leaves fill the blurred background, and the ink is the only dark element in the frame.

Fine line Other Swallow Bird Rose Flower Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling on Hollin Pass since Martinmas, and you stopped counting the guests a week ago. The last carter turned back in November. Now there is salted pork, a sack of flour going grey at the edges, and the back kitchen stove, which you feed with split ash until your palms go numb. The taproom windows have frozen so thick that the lamplight seems to come from inside a jar.

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On the morning the thaw finally starts, something strikes the glass with a dull tap, like a thrown pebble. You find a swallow on the sill, wings half open and forked tail fanned against the frost. You wrap it in a clean linen napkin and set it by the hearth. The only other guest, a surveyor with ink-stained cuffs, looks up from his maps and says swallows never winter in the hills. They go south over the sea, he says, and they don't come back this high.

You sit with the bird until it stirs. It is warm when it goes, the way a loaf is warm when you lift it from the oven. It lifts off the sill, wheels once above the bar, and finds the gap under the eaves where the snow has slipped away.

That evening you find a single grey feather on the windowsill. You tuck it into the ledger, between the page where you wrote the last guest's name and the blank one below, and you draw a line across the top of a fresh column for spring.