Black and grey tattoo of two swallows in flight with a line of script on the side of a person's ribs, lying on white bedding.

Two swallows and script on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight are shown in shaded black and grey, one above and one below a line of cursive script that runs diagonally across the skin. The birds have detailed feather and wing shading, and the script is in fine, dark linework. The bare skin of the side and ribs fills most of the frame, with white bedding and a black garment at the edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift your chair nearer the brazier, for the lamp's guttering and the gaff-men are already rolling the cables. This is the tale of Marrow Jack's swallows, which my own mother told me under a canvas roof in Kent, the summer the Big Wheel caught fire.

Keep reading

Jack ran the cake-walk and the coconut shies for Pellew's Travelling Wonders, and he carried two swallows about in a tin cage, the way other men carry a lucky halfpenny. Every Lady Day he let them go over the fairground, and every October they came back to the same hook above the gate, having flown the length of the country on nothing but a memory of hay and wood smoke. People laughed at him. A bird is a bird, they said, and cannot be trusted to remember a face.

The winter the fair wintered at Dartford, the younger swallow stayed behind in its mud nest under the rafters of the dancing pavilion, and Jack would not leave it. He sat in the cold with a candle and a stub of pencil, copying out the words his wife had called to him at the gate the day she went, and when the wagons pulled out in March he pinned the paper beside the nest. Stories differ on what it said. My mother always swore it said: go on, and I will keep the hook warm.

The spring came in grey and wet. Jack walked the whole route back to Kent with a bad knee and an empty cage, and when he reached the gate the hook was bare. He waited. On the first warm morning a swallow dropped through the gap in the tent flap, settled on the hook, and sat there while the kettle boiled, and Jack stood under it and let it.

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