Two small solid black bird silhouettes tattooed on the inner wrist of a forearm, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small birds on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and wrist with two small, solid black bird silhouettes in flight, one slightly above and to the left of the other. The birds are filled with black ink and have no visible shading or fine detail. The image is black and white, with a soft blurred background that keeps the focus on the small tattoo.

Forearm Bird Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Hallow Mere the same week the miller's daughter, Ada, set her wedding day, and her mother took it as a sign of good fortune. The pair built their nest in the stone lintel above the church door, working mud from the mill race in small wet mouthfuls until the nest was as round as a cup. By the first frost there were three eggs, then none, and then the nest was empty and the door was still standing.

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Ada's intended, a boatwright called Tobias Reed, had promised to give up the sea and stay on the mere. He kept his word for a year. In the second spring he said the herring boats at Lowestoft needed a man who knew the set of the currents, and on the morning he rowed out past the reeds, Ada stood on the staithe with one hand pressed flat against her apron and did not wave.

She did not weep. She walked to the church and asked the sexton for the ladder. Up she climbed, and with her sleeve she wiped the old mud from the lintel, bird by bird, until the stone was bare. "Then neither of you will come back here," she told the empty air, and the sexton, who had heard stranger things said in that churchyard, kept his opinions to himself.

Tobias came home at Michaelmas with salt in his beard. He found the door freshly limed and two new birds on the wire above the mill, one a little higher than the other, both already at work on a nest. Ada stood in the doorway with a broom in her hand and told him he might come in if he wiped his boots.