Pencil drawing of two swallows facing each other above a branch of small blossoms, a traditional-style tattoo design in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows with blossom branch

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two swallows facing each other, their heads touching, with forked tails sweeping down and a branch of small five-petal blossoms beneath them. The birds are drawn with soft graded shading and fine outlines, with feather detail on the wings and tails. The palette is limited to black and grey on a plain white background, with the subject centred in the frame.

Traditional Swallow Bird Blossom Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of the autumn fair you have stopped pretending the swallows aren't yours. They come down off the wire above the dodgems every dusk, two of them, and sit on the lip of the big wheel's gondola as if they had booked it. Mo, who runs the coconut shy and has opinions about everything, says they are the same pair that nested in the canvas of the Waltzer's roof in June, and that swallows mate for life, which is more than the rest of the lot can say.

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You don't argue. You have a tin of seed in your coat pocket meant for the pigeons, and you have been spending it on these two instead, tipping it onto the tarmac by the generator while they bob and watch you with their heads cocked, close enough that you could count the feathers on their tails.

On the last night the fair packs up early because of rain. You find the pair under the awning of the candyfloss van, pressed together against the wet, and somewhere in the drip a blossom branch has been blown off a hedge and lodged across the guy ropes. You untangle it, petals already browning, and tie it to the tent pole with baler twine the way your father taught you to tie a horse.

In the morning the trucks have gone, the field is a rut of mud and paper, and the tent pole is bare except for one small white flower caught in the twine. The swallows are gone too, which is the right order of things. You tell yourself they flew south with the rest. Mo, when he drives past in his cab, leans out and says he saw them go east behind the lorries, and that they didn't look like they were in any hurry at all.