Black and grey swallow tattoos flying from the ankle across the top of a foot, with pink toenail polish visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows flying across an ankle and foot

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of stylised swallows in flight runs from the ankle down across the top of the foot, with the largest bird near the ankle and smaller ones trailing towards the toes. The birds are drawn in solid dark ink with simple grey shading on their wings and bodies. The photograph is taken outdoors on a wooden surface, with the foot and toes in focus and pink nail polish on the toes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the spring the swallows come back to the pit head, and your grandfather says they have nested in the winding house every year since before the cage was electrified. He says they know the shifts better than the overman. You believe him, because you have watched them dip over the slag heap at the change of the bell, when the men come up grey and quiet and the lamp room smells of wet coal.

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Each morning you count them from the lamp room window: eleven, then fourteen, then a stray that flies straight into the wire mesh and drops. You carry it in your cap to the bank behind the chapel, and it lies in your hand, light as a folded letter, until it lifts and joins the flock wheeling over the rows of terraces. Grandfather says a bird that flies with others is never lost on its own road.

The winter the colliery closes, the flock does not come back in April. You stand at the fence with the overman's boy and wait through the whole of the morning shift. Nothing crosses the sky but gulls off the estuary. Then, at the bell that would have sent the cage down, a single swallow drops over the headgear, circles the empty winding house twice, and heads south along the railway line after the others, which must have gone on ahead without you.

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