Traditional style tattoo of two swallows in flight on the upper chest, shaded in black and grey with rust-toned accents on their chests.

Two swallows in flight on upper chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

Two swallows are shown in flight, one above and overlapping the other, with long forked tails and outstretched wings. The linework is bold and the feathers are shaded in black and grey, with soft gradients across the wings. Warm rust tones on the birds' chests and throats add a small amount of colour against the skin.

Traditional Chest Swallow Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the boarding house on the third of April, the same week the bunting went up along the harbour wall. Hilda Penrose saw them first from the scullery window, two dark shapes slicing under the eaves of the coach house, their tails forked like a pair of shears. She counted the nests the way other women counted spoons: one under the gutter, one behind the water butt that had stood empty since Christmas.

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The lodgers complained about the mess on the back step. Mr Gorringe in room four wanted them shifted with a broom. Hilda said nothing, because the birds had come up from Africa, or so the schoolmaster had told her, across more sea than she would ever cross, and they did not ask permission of anybody. She watched them dart out over the slipway at dawn, the older bird always a length ahead, the younger one cutting in close at its wingtip as if it were holding on.

In August Mr Gorringe packed his tin trunk and left without paying the last week. In September the pair began gathering on the telephone wire above the lane, a row of dark commas getting longer. One morning Hilda went out with a cup of tea going cold in her hand and found the wire empty, and below it on the flagstones a single grey feather, forked at the end.

She kept it in the drawer with her husband's letters. The next spring, when the bunting went up again, she left the back door open a crack, and the nests under the gutter were still there.