Back view of a woman in a white backless gown showing a fine line black tattoo of two swallows on her upper back.

Two swallows on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white backless gown is photographed from behind, showing a tattoo of two swallows in flight on her upper back. The swallows are drawn in thin black linework with light shading, and the skin tone is warm against the pale dress. A film poster is partly visible in the background, and the composition is a close, slightly angled crop of the upper body.

Fine line Back Swallow Bird

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, for the fire's low and I'll not be getting up for coal. Your great-grandmother used to say the swallows that stayed past Martinmas had struck a bargain with the frost. Two of them, out of all the nests in Hollin Barn, didn't go south that autumn. They sat on the rafter above the hay bales and watched the last of the ploughing from the wire, as if they were waiting on a carter who'd forgotten them.

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Maud Penrose climbed the barn ladder every morning with a saucer of crumbed bread and a cup of warm milk, and every morning the pair of them tipped their heads at her as though she were late. The snow came in January and buried the lane to the top gate. Her boy Tom found them one dawn on the cold lip of the water trough, not flying, only sitting, their blue backs dusted white like sugar on a cake. He carried them up to the kitchen in his cupped hands, and Maud set them on the hearth where the heat could find them.

They sat there three weeks, and Maud talked to them about the price of wool and the hard-headed ram that wouldn't be driven. Then the wind changed in February, soft out of the south-west, smelling of wet earth. On the third morning of the thaw, the door was propped open and the two of them went up through the rafters, round the barn once, round the house once, and out over the church spire in a long low curve towards the sea.

Maud found one blue feather on the bottom rung of the ladder. She kept it in the family Bible, between Ruth and Naomi. So when the first swallow comes back to Hollin each April, look up at the old beam above the door, for that's where they always nest, and that's where they'll be waiting for us.