Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three swallows in flight

Black and grey · Flash

Three swallows fly in a loose arc, each drawn with fine hatched linework in black ink. Soft grey wash and scattered dots surround the birds, leaving open white space on the page. The image is a single sheet shown on a wooden surface, with the birds arranged diagonally across the composition.

Swallow Bird Flight Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the customs hut on the same day every year, the second week of April, before the snow had quite left the pass. You have kept a tally on the inside of the door frame since your first season, a pencil stroke for each arrival, and by the third spring there were three neat columns of marks, one for each bird you had learned to tell apart by the way it banked.

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Your colleague Dragan thought you were soft. He said a border was a line on a map and birds could not read maps. You let him say it. At the start of each shift you opened the window, and the swallows came in low over the tarmac, past the lorries waiting with their engines ticking, and wheeled up under the eaves where they had built a mud cup the size of a teacup. The drivers learned to wait for them. Nobody filled in a form for a swallow.

In October the papers came through with a new order: the crossing would close to night traffic and the hut would be moved down the valley to the new road. On the last morning you found the three birds on the telegraph wire, shoulder to shoulder, all facing south. You stood at the barrier with the stamp in your hand and waited for the first lorry, and it did not come, so for once there was nothing to stamp.

When you climbed into the van you left the window down a crack. Somewhere past the summit, above the grey wash of cloud, three dark shapes swept across the road ahead of you and turned as one, and you did not need a pencil to know which way they were going.