Two black and grey swallows tattooed on a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's upper shoulder and neck, with two swallows in flight tattooed on the skin. The birds are rendered in black ink with soft grey shading that suggests feathers and form, and the wings are angled in opposite directions. The plain pale background keeps the focus on the tattoo, and a thin silver chain is visible at the neck.

Shoulder Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Lorraine had been caretaker at Hollins Court for nineteen years and had never once seen a swallow above the fourth floor. So when the work order came in about the stairwell vent on the eleventh floor, the one that rattled every time the wind came off the ring road, she climbed the ladder expecting pigeons and found a cup of mud stuck to the concrete like a hand cupped for water.

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The contractor from the council wanted it bricked up by Friday. Lorraine stood on the landing with the work order folded in her back pocket and watched the swallows come through the gap in the louvre, two of them, dropping out of the grey sky so fast they seemed to be falling until the last second, when they swung up and under the concrete lip. Their tails split like scissors. One of them had a bit of straw in its beak, and it did not look at her once.

She rang the office and said the vent was unsafe for the men to work near, which was nearly true, and she wrote on the form that the birds were nesting and would have to wait. Every morning after that she came up the stairs with a flask and sat on the step below the vent and counted. Three eggs by the second week. Then four chicks with their mouths open like a row of small red letters, and the parents taking turns to skim past the window of the flats across the yard, mouths full of gnats.

In September the nest went quiet. Lorraine climbed up on the last morning and found it empty, the mud cup still clean at the rim. Outside, on the aerial wire between the blocks, the swallows sat in a row with the young among them, all of them pointing the same way, south over the chimneys. She unfolded the work order, wrote "vent sound, leave as is" across the bottom, and went down to put the kettle on.