Black and grey traditional swallow tattoos on the upper chest of a person, with bold outlines and solid shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on a chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight sit side by side on the upper chest, one on each side of the centre. The birds have bold black outlines, solid black wings with fine grey hatched detail, and pale grey bodies. The photograph is taken close up in black and grey, with the chest hair and collarbones visible around the tattoos.

Traditional Chest Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brannoch's castle had been roofless since the year the river changed course, and the swallows came back to it every spring regardless. Old Maud kept goats on the slope below and said the birds were the only tenants with any sense. Two of them, she said, had nested in the north tower for as long as anyone could remember, and they were a pair who never quarrelled.

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Her grandson Tam was seventeen and had no patience for birds. He wanted the lord's silver, which was said to lie under the flagstones of the chapel, and one March morning he took a spade up the hill without telling anyone. He dug until his palms blistered. When he finally struck iron it was only a rusted hinge, and he sat down among the nettles and cried like a child, which embarrassed him more than the hinge did.

The swallows came down to the broken wall beside him, one from the east side and one from the west, and they perched so close their wings touched. Tam had watched them all his life without really seeing them. Now he saw the forked tails, the dark throats, the pale bellies like cream left in a bowl. One of them dropped to the grass near the hinge, lifted something small and bright in its beak, and flew it up to the tower window to drop it on the sill.

Tam climbed the stair. On the sill lay a single coin, green with age, worked free from the mortar by patient beaks. He carried it down to Maud. She turned it over in her palm and laughed until she had to sit on a stone. "They've been bringing these down for forty years," she said. "Everyone digs, love. Only the ones who sit still get paid."