Black silhouette tattoo design of three swallows in flight above the words MATTHEW 6:26 on a white background.

Three swallows and Matthew 6:26

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows three solid black silhouettes of swallows in flight, with forked tails and angled wings, arranged in a loose diagonal. The bird shapes are filled with no internal linework, and the words MATTHEW 6:26 sit in bold, upright capitals to the right of the lower birds. It is a single flat black image on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Swallow Bird Silhouette Scripture reference Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Aunt Hesper,

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The granary doors at Carrow Hollow have been barred since the frost came early, and the steward has taken the keys to his own chamber, so you need not write again asking whether we are starving. We are not. The swallows are. Three of them came down the valley road this morning, low over the millrace, and they did not stop to drink at the trough the way they always do. They flew straight into the gap under the chapel eaves where the old nests are, and then they came out again and went on towards the marsh.

Tomas says they are only birds and do not know a bad winter from a good one. I told him that is exactly the point. My mother used to read us the line about the birds of the air, how they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and how somebody feeds them anyway. I always thought it a foolish thing to put in a book, because the birds at Carrow have never been fed by anyone but the millers' children, and those children learned early to be quick with their hands.

Still, I went to the granary this afternoon with a basket and a knife. Behind the third bin there is a sack the steward forgot, half full of barley gone soft at the seams. I did not take it all. I took what three small birds could eat in a week and left the rest, and I scattered it on the cobbles under the chapel eaves while the wind was still.

They came back at dusk, all three, dropping in sharp and black against the last of the light, tails forked like the points of a pair of shears. I do not think they were grateful. I think they were simply hungry, and that was enough.

Your loving niece, Ysolde