Two black and grey shaded swallows in flight, tattooed on the forearm beside a beaded bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows are shown in flight, one above the other, with their wings spread and heads turned to the right. The birds are drawn with dark outlines and soft grey shading on the wings and bodies, with lighter areas left on the bodies for depth. The tattoo sits on a forearm against a blurred background, with a beaded bracelet visible along the lower edge.

Forearm Swallow Bird Wing Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bottle, love, and sit where the light's on your face so I can see you listening. You want the swallows? Right. This is the summer the lift on the fourteenth floor gave up for good and Mr Oduya carried his own shopping up the stairs, swearing in two languages.

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The birds came up off the river that May, the way they always do, and nested in the gap above the stairwell vent where the concrete never got sealed. Nobody thought much of it. Two of them, though, were different. One flew a bit ahead of the other, wings flat and fast, and the second kept turning its head back, as if it had left something in the car park and couldn't stop checking.

Ada Pell on the ninth floor said they were a married pair, which was nonsense, because Ada said that about every pair she ever saw. But I watched them. Every evening the leading bird would dive past the bins, swing round the stair tower, and come back up to wait on the railing for its partner to catch up. It never once flew home alone.

Then in July the first one didn't come back. The other kept at it for a fortnight, circling the block with its wings out and its head turned to the place where the nest had been. Then the council sent men with ladders and sealed the gap with grey foam, and that was that, or so we all thought.

Next spring a boy left the stairwell window open when he shouldn't have, and by June there were two swallows in the stairwell again. The one I'd watched came first and sat on the rail, and waited. Then the other came sweeping round the corner, and the pair of them went off over the car park together, heads turned back toward us, as if to say, wait for us, we're coming back.