Colour tattoo of two swallows in a gold filigree frame with blue gemstones, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in an ornate gold frame

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two swallows face each other within a gold scrolled frame, with a blue gem above and below. The birds are shaded in deep blue, purple and cream, with teal wash behind them. The composition is centred and symmetrical, and the skin shows some redness and texture.

Neo-trad Calf Swallow Bird Frame Gemstone Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows had nested in the packing shed for three summers before anyone thought to look at them properly. By August the pair sat on the crossbeam above the cider press, close as two buttons on one coat, and my grandmother said they were quarrelling. I said they were kissing. We argued about it every evening while she polished the old gilt mirror she had hung on the shed wall, the one with the scrolled frame and the two blue glass stones, because she liked to look at something pretty while she worked.

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The mirror had belonged to her mother, who had sold apples from this same orchard in a town that no longer existed. Grandmother said the blue stones were sapphires, which I doubted, and that the frame was real gold leaf under the dust, which I only believed after I scraped a corner with my thumbnail and found the yellow underneath. Each evening the swallows watched us from the beam. Nobody had told them the shed was meant for storing cider.

At the end of August the wind swung round to the north and the swallows began to gather on the telephone wire by the lane, dozens of them, shuffling and chattering like a school before the bell. My grandmother put down her cloth and said they were going south, all the way to somewhere hot, and that the pair in the shed would go with them, though they would come back next spring to the same beam if the shed was still standing.

On the last evening the shed was empty except for the mirror. I climbed up on the upturned crate and looked at my own face between the two gems, and beside it, in the glass, I saw the bare beam where the swallows had perched. I hung the cloth on its nail and went in for supper. The next morning the beam was empty, and the blue stones still caught the light the way they always had, as if they were keeping a place for someone.