Realistic colour tattoo of two swallows in flight on the left side of a torso, one above the other across the ribs.

Two swallows on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Two swallows in flight are tattooed along the side of the ribcage, with one higher on the back and one lower towards the hip. The feathers are shaded in black and grey with fine detail on the wings and tails, while the heads have blue sheen and red throats. The soft tones of the skin and the bird placement create a balanced, diagonal composition against a dark background.

Realism Ribs Swallow Bird Wing Feather Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Mabel Quay sits moored at Hythe Lock in the November fog, and the swallows have already gone south, which your uncle Ned says is the only sensible thing a bird has ever done. You are fourteen and sent to scrub the bilges because the cook's boy quit at Oxford. The boat smells of coal smoke, linseed and wet rope. Under the bunk Ned keeps a biscuit tin of letters, every envelope addressed in the same looping hand from a woman in Wallingford who never once signed her name.

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On the third evening you find the tin open. Pressed flat between the letters are two feathers, one blue-black and one with a rust-red edge, and a pencil drawing of two birds in flight, the lower one banking low over a weir. You carry it up to the wheelhouse, where Ned is splicing a line by lamplight. He doesn't look up. "Swallows follow the water," he says. "They know where the flies are before the flies do. My mother used to say they carried messages between the banks."

You ask who the woman was. He pulls the splice tight with his teeth and says she wrote every week for nine years, and every week he sent back one line about the weather. "Safest way I knew to say I was still on the river." You tell him the birds in the drawing look like they never stop, always turning upstream or down. He laughs, the first time in days, and the sound startles the lamp.

In the morning the fog lifts and the lock gates groan open. You stand at the bow with the tin under your arm and watch two swallows skim the towpath, one high and one low, then wheel back towards the town where the letters came from. Ned casts off without a word. You fold the drawing into your coat, go aft, and take the tiller.