Black and grey traditional swallow tattoo with bold outlines on the side of a person's ribs, partly covered by a striped shirt.

Swallow tattoo on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey swallow in flight is tattooed on the left side of a person's ribcage, with wings spread and a forked tail. The bold outlines and solid black fills are typical of American traditional work, and the soft grey tones of the photograph make the linework stand out. The composition is cropped to the torso, with a striped shirt lifted at the top and a hand resting on the waistband of the jeans below.

Traditional Ribs Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire along Pardoe's lane had forty-one swallows on it by the Tuesday, and Uncle Dai said that was the number that meant they'd be gone by Friday. He said it the way he said the cider was ready, which is to say he had been wrong before and didn't mind. I was up the Bramley ladder with a bucket hooked on one wrist, filling it with Discoveries that split when they hit the grass, and I could hear the birds chattering over the orchard like a row of women at a bus stop.

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Morty, who had sailed the Lancashire coasters before his knees gave out, taught Dai the old trade. Every swallow on a sailor's skin meant five thousand miles of sea, and the bird always came home, so you got one for each crossing. Dai had a faded pair on his forearm, the colour of weak tea. 'Never got one for the ones that stayed behind,' he said, when I asked what the birds on the wire were for. 'Those don't go on anybody.'

On Friday the wire was bare. Not a feather. Dai stood in the yard with his tea going cold and said nothing about numbers. I carried the last crate to the press myself, and when I came back past the gate there was one swallow left on the cross-arm, tail open like a pair of shears, looking at the empty line as if it had mislaid something.

I didn't count it. I watched it drop off the wood and go low over the perry pears towards the church tower, and I stood there with the bucket until the sound of it had gone, which was the sound of August.