Close crop of a woman in a black bra with skeleton hand cups, showing black ink swallows and script on her chest and shoulder and a floral tattoo on her upper arm.

Swallows and script on chest and upper arm

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's chest, shoulder and upper arm, with her face out of frame. Several small black swallows sit on the chest and shoulder, with a line of script above them and a larger floral piece on the upper arm. The tattoos are in black and grey ink, shown against a black bra with skeleton hand cups and a dark background.

Chest Shoulder Upper arm Swallow Script Floral Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the swallows came back to the eaves of the salt-house at Orrin, and every spring old Maud counted them as they arrived. Twelve, her mother had said, and twelve there must be. The year the wells dried, only eleven came over the grey water from the south, and the last of them dropped onto her windowsill with one wing folded like a letter.

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Maud did not know what a bird could carry, but she tied a thread of red wool to its leg and set a dish of barley water beside it. By morning the bird was gone, and so was the thread. Down the lane the well began to rise, a finger's width a day. The villagers called it luck. Maud called it a bargain, and said the swallow would come back to collect.

It came back in the autumn, when the first frost bit the nettles. It perched on the salt-house beam and would not leave, though Maud swept beneath it and Tobiah the carter cursed it for fouling his cart. Then a stranger rode in from the south on a grey mare, his coat sewn all over with coins, asking after an old woman who counted birds and a red thread tied to a small brown life.

Maud gave him a stool and a question: what had he lost at sea? His brother, he said, in a storm off the headland, and he had promised the sea a thread of his own for a safe return. The swallow flew down from the beam, took a single red fibre from the hem of his coat, and went out over the water. That evening Maud counted the birds on the eaves, as she always did, and got twelve.