Black and grey fine line tattoo of three small swallows in flight on the neck, just behind the ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three swallows behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows three small black swallow silhouettes in a diagonal row on the skin of the neck, below the hairline and behind the ear. The birds are simple, solid shapes with minimal detail, each angled in the same direction. The image is monochrome and the soft focus keeps the background light and uncluttered.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room at the Dales Hotel still smelled of chip fat and floor polish, which was more than could be said for the rest of us. Mr Hurst, who taught chemistry and now needed both hands to hold a plastic cup, shook my hand twice and asked which year I'd been in. I told him the year Dana Pryce drew swallows on everything: my maths book, the radiator, the back of the lunch menu. She swore they came back to the same eaves every spring however far they'd gone, and it was the only sensible thing anyone had ever taught me about geography.

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Nobody had heard from her since the summer she left for Toronto. Gemma by the trestle table said there had been a postcard once, then nothing, then a rumour about a sheep farm in Patagonia that Carl Dunn had disproved by pointing out he had never been further than Skegness. I found a free chair by the window and folded a page of the reunion programme into the shape Dana had taught me: a long wedge for the wings, a forked tail, and a small snip at the end so it looked like it was banking into a turn.

I had made three when the desk clerk came over holding an envelope with a Portuguese stamp, addressed to Pryce, Reunion, c/o Dales Hotel, in handwriting I would have known anywhere. Inside was a card with a harbour on the front and nothing written on the back except three swallows, drawn in biro, flying in a diagonal row towards the edge of the page.

I pinned it to the corkboard beside the sign-in sheet, next to my paper birds. Mr Hurst read it over my shoulder, squinted, and said it was the same bird she had drawn on his blackboard in 1994. Then he went off to find his glasses, and nobody in the room mentioned the sheep farm again.

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