Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in flight

Mixed · Flash

A pair of swallows dive and swoop across the page, drawn with long, sweeping tail feathers and sharp wing tips. The bodies are filled with solid black ink, while one bird's wing has a pale lavender wash and thin contour lines. The design sits centred on a plain white background with plenty of open space around it.

Swallow Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the boathouse rafters the week the herring boats went out, and Ada Finlay said that meant the weather would turn by Thursday. She was right, and by Thursday the wind had come round to the north-west and the sky over Skerry had gone the colour of wet slate. Her son Callum was out past the Ness with the Morag Rose and two men from Hollin, and nobody on the island could see further than the end of the breakwater.

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Ada went down to the boathouse with a paraffin lamp, and found the pair of swallows sitting on the crossbeam, very still, their long tails hanging like the ropes of a bell. They did not fly off when she climbed the ladder. The old people always said a swallow that stays put in a storm is keeping a promise. Ada did not believe that, but she held the lamp up anyway and watched them.

When the light went off the water, the birds dropped from the beam and went out through the open door into the dark. Ada ran after them along the shingle with the lamp swinging. They swooped low over the breakers, sharp wings tipping one way and then the other, and they turned back again and again, the way a dog works sheep. Each time they reached the end of the pier they doubled back to look at her.

Just after midnight a pale shape showed beyond the Ness, then the splutter of an engine that had no business running in that sea. Callum brought the Morag Rose in against the slip with the tiller lashed and his hands raw from the rope. He said two birds had flown ahead of the bow the whole way home, skimming the crests. Ada said nothing. She went back up to the boathouse and hung the lamp on its hook, and in the morning the swallows were gone, and nobody on Skerry has cut a nest from those rafters since.