Two small blue and black swallows in flight, tattooed on the upper chest near the collarbone, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in flight on the chest

Traditional · Chest · Colour · Photo

Two small swallows fly in opposite directions across the upper chest, one tilted left and one tilted right. Their wings are shaded with blue wash that fades toward the tips, with black linework outlining the feathers, bodies and forked tails. The skin is pale and the photograph is taken close up, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Traditional Chest Swallow Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came under the iron bridge at Cutler's Wharf every evening in May, just as the last lorries cleared the cobbles. Mrs Okonedo swore they had nested in the same gap for nine summers, though nobody had ever seen the nest. I worked the night shift at the bakery across the water, so I saw them most often when I took my break on the step, flour still on my forearms and the canal gone the colour of pewter under the sodium lamps.

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That June there were two of them, and they were never together. One came off the water each dusk heading west toward the reservoirs, blue to the tips of its wings where the light caught it. The other went east over the rooftops toward the docks, forking its tail like a pair of scissors through the orange haze. I started timing them. Forty seconds apart, always, as if someone had set a clock between them and forgotten to wind it.

On the last night of the month the western one didn't come back. I stood on the step with my tea going cold and watched the eastbound bird slip past the gasworks chimney. Then I heard a wing against the bridge girders, close and sudden, and there it was, the pair of them held in one clean stretch of air for a heartbeat before it dropped to the water and skimmed away under the arches.

Next morning I walked the towpath to the reservoir gate with the van keys still in my pocket. Nobody had told me anything. I only wanted to see the sky over the water, the blue running out to the edges of the feathers. Two swallows crossed over me, one each way, and I didn't try to follow either of them.