Black and grey fine line tattoo of three swallows in flight across the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three swallows on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three small swallows fly at different angles across the side of the ribcage, each with outstretched wings and forked tails. The linework is fine and delicate, with soft grey shading on the wings and bodies. The image is in black and grey, with the birds set against plain, pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been counting the swallows on the telegraph wire since the first week of September, because your grandmother said the number tells you how hard the winter will be. Thirty-one on Monday, twenty-six on Tuesday. The wire sags over the lane between the forge and the last cottage before the beeches begin, and the birds sit along it like notes on a stave until one drops off to snap at a fly above the duckpond.

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Three are left by Thursday. They are the late brood from the rafters of the cart shed, still with the pale rust at their throats that the young ones keep for a few weeks, and they have not yet learned that the road south runs over the sea. Mrs Pyle at the post office says the frost will come early this year. You carry the bucket of windfalls out past the water butt and stand under the eaves, pretending you are not waiting for anything.

On Friday you pull the shed door wide and the three of them go up together, not in a line but splayed, each one tipping away towards a different corner of the sky as though they have agreed on nothing. The forked tails flick open. One dips low over the hedge and you lose it against the dark wall of the beeches. The other two circle the church tower twice, then are gone too.

You stay with the bucket until your fingers ache. In April, when the mud cups go up again under the rafters, you will be the one who has to climb the ladder and look inside, to see whether any of them came home.

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