Black and grey swallows flying toward an ornate baroque mirror frame tattooed on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Swallows and an ornate mirror frame on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman seen from behind, with her dark hair pulled to one side and her upper back bare. Three small swallows in flight sit to the left of the tattoo, and one swallow with lighter shading flies at the far left, while an ornate scrolled mirror frame sits to the right, with a few birds flying inside its open centre. The bold outlines and shading are in black and grey tones, set against plain pale skin and a blurred background.

Traditional Back Swallow Bird Mirror Frame Ornament Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass went in the January flood, so by the time the swallows gathered on the telegraph wire that September, the old mirror frame on the cart shed wall had nothing in its middle but the yard and the sky. Ada Pellow had hung it there for her husband's mother, who used to say a frame with nothing in it was honest about its purpose. Nobody at Lower Hensby argued with her about that. Nobody argued much at all that year.

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The birds went through it before they left. Ada watched from the back step with her apron full of kindling, one after another flicking through the open oval as if the frame were a gate they had been told about. By the first hard frost the wire was empty and the trough had a skin of ice. She broke it each morning with the heel of her boot, fed the hens, and spoke to the frame the way she spoke to the cow, without expecting much back. The snow came down over the midden, the cart shed roof sagged, and the lane stayed shut for six weeks.

In the third week of March a single swallow came over the hedge low and tired, its tail forked like a pair of shears. It circled the yard once, then twice, and on the third pass it flew straight through the frame and perched on the nail where the glass had been. Ada stood with the bucket in her hand and did not move. The bird looked at her, then at the open lane beyond the gate, and sang something short and rude.

She understood then what the frame was for. It had never been meant to hold anything. It was there so that whatever left could find its own way back through the same small shape, and the next morning she moved the ladder under it, scraped the nail clean, and left the frame exactly where it was.