Two black swallows in flight over a teal watercolour-style wash on the side of an ankle.

Two swallows and teal wash on ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two black swallows fly across the ankle, drawn with soft, feathered shading and sharp tips on the wings and tails. A loose band of turquoise wash runs between and around them, with small scattered droplets along its edges. The photograph is taken at a low angle against a blurred wooden floor and pale wall, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Ankle Swallow Bird Flight Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the swallows came back to Harrow Point, and every spring the council men came up with their ladders and wire mesh to shut the nests out. Old Mrs Adeyemi on the eleventh floor said the birds had been flying over that estate since before the concrete, following the river that once ran under it, and they would not be told otherwise.

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The river was culverted in the fifties and buried under the car park and the bins, but the water still wanted out. Her grandson swore he had seen it rise through the drain grates after rain, a thin green seam running along the kerb and up the stairwell walls in the dark. The swallows followed it. They dipped down over the bins, then up past the balconies, and the families who had moved in from other places said it was only birds.

In June the mesh went up on the sixth floor and the lift broke, so the two swallows who had nested there that year had nowhere to go but out. They came down the stairwell like a pair of thrown knives, one behind the other, and skimmed the wet green line from the car park to the canal. Mrs Adeyemi watched from her window with a cup of tea going cold. She said afterwards that they never once looked back for the nest, and that was the sensible thing, because the nest was gone anyway.