Small black and grey swallow tattoo in flight on the side of a woman's ribs, under her arm, with a blurred crowd behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on the side ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the side of the torso, below the arm. The bird is drawn with dark, shaded linework that shows the wing feathers and body in grey tones. The background is softly blurred, with a person in a black sleeveless top in the foreground and a crowd outside the frame.

Traditional Ribs Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Carrow Junction the same week every year, when the gorse went yellow along the cutting. They nested under the iron canopy of platform two, and the signalman's wife swept their droppings off the bench each morning and never once asked them to go elsewhere.

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One spring a swallow arrived with a loop of red wool caught round one leg. Mrs Pryce, who kept the lost property office, said it was the same bird that had carried off a child's glove in April and dropped it, spotless, into the guard's hat. She tied a scrap of blue ribbon to the nest so the bird would know her hands, and the bird let her.

The line was to close after the last Saturday service in September. On that afternoon the swallow came down off the roof and kept pace with the third carriage all the way to the river bridge. Tom Hadley, eleven years old and told to stay in his seat, pressed his palm to the glass and watched it dip once, low over the water, before the bridge swallowed the light.

By Monday the nest was empty. Mrs Pryce swept the bench regardless. Some places, she said, you keep swept for the birds who still think they have a train to catch.