Black and grey fine line tattoo of three swallows in flight across the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three swallows in flight on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three swallows are shown in flight, each at a slightly different angle, with their wings spread and tail feathers forked. The linework is fine and the feathers and bodies are softly shaded in greys, giving them depth against the skin. The image is in black and white, with the birds set diagonally across the ribcage and plenty of clean skin around them.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third swallow was always the slowest to leave the eaves, and Ada Pringle had come to think of it as the one that needed watching. Her mother had kept the house on Marrow Terrace for thirty years, and the birds had nested in the same gutter for longer than that, so the family had stopped minding the mess on the front step.

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In August the attic lodger, Mr Cadell, a surveyor who had come to chart the bay and stayed three weeks past his brief, asked her to fetch his telescope down from the sill. He held it to the window and swore softly at the light. Three birds crossed the harbour wall in a loose line, he said, and every sailor on the coast could tell you that swallows flying apart like that meant the wind was turning. He said it as if he had been waiting all summer to say something true to someone who would not argue. Ada took the telescope back up the stairs herself that night, because nobody else in the house was awake to do it.

He left on the Tuesday boat with a tin trunk and a paper parcel for her mother, wrapped in brown string. The gulls were loud over the slipway. Ada stood with the wet washing at her hip and watched the three swallows come off the roofline and drop low over the water, the third one lagging the others by a stroke or two.

It circled back once, close enough to touch the line, then turned south after the rest.

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