Colour tattoo of two swallows with purple wings and green and red bodies across the upper chest and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows across the chest

Traditional · Chest · Colour · Photo

Two swallows with outstretched purple wings and green and red bodies are tattooed across the upper chest, one angled towards the shoulder. The bold dark outlines and flat, solid fills of purple, green, red and yellow give a classic traditional look, with green ribbon-like tails trailing from each bird. The cropped frame shows only the chest and shoulder area, with the birds set against smooth skin.

Traditional Chest Shoulder Swallow Bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows should have gone in September, but by the second week of January they were still roosting in the hayloft above the cattle shed, and you have stopped pretending it is only the cold keeping them. Your aunt Mair counts them every morning from the yard gate with her tea going cold in her hand. Two birds, purple wings folded tight against the frost, green ribbons of tail trailing behind them like the streamers from the Whitsun fair. She says they are waiting for a gap in the weather over the Channel. You suspect she means the old ones, the ones who have lost their nerve.

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You carry the feed up the ladder each dawn and the red breasts flicker in the rafters as you climb. The one with the bent left wing always lands on the bale nearest the lamp, as if it has been told where to sit. You talk to it while you work. You tell it about the letter from the council that came in the post, the one about the top field and the developers in their clean coats, and about how your aunt pretends not to have read it. The bird tilts its head, bright-eyed, and says nothing, which is more than the men from the council managed.

In March the lanes soften and the rooks start their racket in the elms. One morning the hayloft is empty except for a curl of green ribbon caught on a nail, fine as cotton. You pick it off and hold it up to the window. Out in the yard your aunt is already leaning on the gate, watching the sky, and you find you are no longer waiting for her to say anything. You take down the letter from the nail where you pinned it, fold it into your coat, and go out to tell her the swallows have left and you are staying.