Black and grey fine line tattoo of two swallows in flight on the side of a torso, above the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows in flight are tattooed on the side of a torso, one angled upward and one diving downward. The linework is fine and tapered, with soft grey shading in the wings and bodies. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph with a navel piercing and dark lace fabric visible at the edges.

Fine line Ribs Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the swallows before you learn the names of your neighbours. They nest under the soffit of Hadley House, fourteenth floor, where the render has cracked into a shape like a map of somewhere nobody has been. Every April the pair come back to the same ledge outside the kitchen window, and every April you tell yourself you will move the washing line before they arrive, and every April you don't.

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Your mum said swallows mean the sea is near. Hadley House is three miles from the nearest sea, on the wrong side of a dual carriageway, so you decided she was wrong and that they just liked the height. You timed their flights with the kettle. The one with the forked tail climbed the air above the car park like it was a staircase, then folded and dropped past your window so fast the glass hummed. The other always waited for it by the bins, and they came back up together, close enough that you could hear the wing beats if you held your breath.

In June the eggs hatched, and the noise changed from chirp to a rasp of hunger. You stopped hanging laundry out and started leaving the window open a crack, which the council would have had something to say about. Then came the morning you found the ledge empty and a single feather stuck to the sill, blue-black and tapered to a point.

You went down fourteen floors with the lift smelling of bleach, out to the car park, and you looked up. Two swallows were turning over the roofline, one diving, one rising, sharing the same stretch of sky as if neither had noticed the other was leaving. You stood there until the lift doors behind you opened and closed twice.