Colour traditional tattoo of two swallows, a yellow measuring tape and a black needle and thread on the upper thigh.

Swallows and measuring tape on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two swallows, one teal and orange and one purple and red, are shown with a yellow measuring tape looping between them and a black needle with thread below. Bold black outlines define the forms, with shaded wing detail and small printed words on the tape. Colour ink dominates against the pale skin, and the design is framed centrally on the limb.

Traditional Thigh Swallow Bird Needle Thread

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold still, the lot of you, and keep out of the bean rows. Now, the tape. Mrs Ottoline Greave had a measuring tape that had belonged to her mother, yellow as a late crocus, and there were no numbers on it at all, only words stamped along its length. Sweet ran down one side. Fine, Unique, Divine. When a girl stood in her front room for a wedding frock, Mrs Greave would loop the tape round her waist, read off whichever word it landed on, and the girl would walk home believing every syllable. The frocks always fitted. That was the trick of it, though nobody ever thought to ask what the trick was.

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The swallows came the spring the needle went missing. Two of them, one with a teal back and an orange breast, the other all purple and rust, and they built in the rafters of the coach house right above her sewing box. Mrs Greave found the needle hooked through the mud lip of their cup, thread trailing down like a fishing line, and she stood on the ladder with her hand out, ready to be cross. Then the purple one turned its head and fixed her with one bright black eye, and she couldn't do it. She climbed down and fetched the tape instead.

She read the words aloud to them, every one, the way you'd read a child its prayers. Glamorous. Amazing. Pretty. The swallows sat on the beam and listened, or pretended to. Each evening after that she laid a length of thread across the bench, and each morning it was gone, woven into the cup. By August the nest had hardened and the young were shouldering at the mouth, so she measured the cup with her tape, and it came to exactly the width of her two palms.

She wrote the figure down on the back of an envelope, the first honest number that tape had ever given her.