Black and grey shaded swallows in flight with small star and dot accents, tattooed on the side of the ribs in a traditional style.

Two swallows with stars on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows fly in opposite diagonal directions, with long forked tails and outstretched wings, and small star and dot shapes scattered around them. The birds are rendered with bold outlines and soft grey shading on the feathers and bodies, with darker tones at the wing tips and tails. The image is a close crop of bare skin, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and no other colour present apart from the skin tones.

Traditional Ribs Swallow Bird Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House had been broken since March, so Nan Oyelaran climbed the stairs with a bag of shopping on each arm, counting landings the way her mother had counted beads. On the ninth floor a boy sat on the concrete with a tin of chalk, drawing birds with forked tails along the walkway wall. "Those'll be gone by Friday," she said. "Rain takes everything in this place." He didn't look up. "The swallows know where they are, though."

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Every summer two swallows nested in the gutter above flat fourteen. One came up from the river in the south, the other down from the reservoir in the north, and they met over the bins each dawn, always flying opposite ways, like two neighbours passing on a narrow stair. The old folk said the birds were chasing the stars the lamp posts threw down, and that if you counted the dots scattered round a swallow you would learn your own luck. Nan had never counted. She had always thought it a story to keep children off the roof.

In June the council came with scaffolding and sealed the gutters with grey foam. The boy kept drawing. Every morning there were more stars on the walkway, little cross shapes and rings of chalk dots, running from the ninth floor up the stairwell to fourteen. One wet afternoon Nan's knee gave out on the last flight, and she sat down beside him and watched the chalk go pale in the drizzle.

The swallows came back and circled the scaffold, confused by the foam. Then they dropped low over the stairwell, following the chalk stars one by one, until they reached the gutter that was no longer theirs. The boy stood up and waved his arms like a man flagging a bus. The birds met above the walkway with a flick of forked tails, then each went its own way, as it always had. Nan picked up her shopping and climbed the last flight, counting the stars.