Black and grey traditional tattoo of two swallows in flight, a sunburst and a small flower on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows and sunburst on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight are shown in front of a solid dark sun with radiating rays above them, and a flower sits beneath them at the base of the design. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black fills and grey shading used for the sun and the wing detail. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the back of the hand, with the fingers visible below.

Traditional Hand Swallow Sun Sunburst Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The swallows came back to the net shed on Tuesday. I think they're the same pair as last year, though Mrs Rennie says they all look alike to people who have stopped looking properly. They went straight to the beam above the door, the one with your initials scratched in it, and sat there chattering as if they'd only popped out for bread. I stood in the yard with the milk pail and laughed at them until I had to put it down.

The sun has been out all week, a hard white sort that sits on the water like a dropped coin. Eddie asked me on Wednesday why the birds bother coming all this way when they could stay warm and save themselves the trouble. I told him they were homesick, which is what he wanted to hear, though I think it's really that the sea is too big to cross without a reason. He wanted to know if they came back for the same sun every year. I said yes, and he said then they must like it better than the south, and I had no answer to that.

The sea pinks by the gate have opened, the ones your mother put in before she went. I cut a handful for the table and they wilted by dinner the way everything does here, quick and without complaint.

I've been counting days, forty-one of them now, and I've stopped pretending I haven't. The byre door is propped open. The birds have already found the nest. If the boat comes in before the first frost, you'll know the house by the noise, and you'll come up the path the way they come in, straight and without stopping to look back at the water.

Love, Ruth