Realism style tattoo of two swallows in flight across a woman's upper back, shaded in grey with small red accents on their faces.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in flight across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two swallows fly in opposite directions across the upper back, one smaller and turned to the left, the other larger and turned to the right. Their wings and bodies are built up with soft grey shading and fine feather detail, with small red patches on the heads. The photograph is taken from behind the subject, who wears a black top, and the tattoos fill most of the frame against warm skin tones.

Realism Back Swallow Bird Wing Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the kettle's on and nobody leaves until I've finished, so don't ask me about the lift again. Nineteen floors at Harrow Court, and every summer the swallows came back to it the way the rent went up, without asking anybody. They nested under the walkway canopies on the ninth floor where the concrete held the heat, their mud cups stuck up like thimbles.

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There was a woman on the ninth called Maud Carew who kept a window box of basil and hated the birds for the mess. She swept their droppings off her step every morning with a dustpan and a face. Then one June the pair nesting above her door started going out together, one small and quick, the other bigger and slower, and they'd come back at dusk so close their wings nearly touched on the landing rail.

Her brother Eli had been sent out to the Gulf on a contract that never came home with him, and his postcards arrived with no return address. Maud read them out on the rail, facing the courtyard, and the swallows sat there listening, or so she told me, which is the sort of thing she'd say. In August she wrote him one line on the back of a bus ticket, tied it to a basil stalk, and the next morning the small swallow had pulled it loose and carried it off across the car park toward the river.

Whether it reached anybody, I couldn't tell you. But the bigger one stayed on the rail every evening after that, turned the way they face when they're about to leave, waiting for the other to come back. Mind your step on the way out. The stairs are worse than the lift.