Let me tell you about this bird

So, my first tattoo?  The one I didn’t get because I’m not ready to spend quality time in a tattoo studio?

It was going to be this bird, or something very much like it:

At first blush, it probably looks like I’m just another silly chick who wanted swallow tattoo (one of the biggest clichés out there) and found a pretty picture on the internet.  But let me tell you about this bird.

This is a barn swallow.  It is the national bird of Estonia, the country where my grandmother was born.  When she was a child, my grandmother fled the country with her mother and sisters because of the Second World War.  She never returned – partly because, as a working class woman with five kids, she could never afford it and partly because the country was occupied by the Soviets and was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

As far as she was concerned, that country and its culture were part of her past, and would stay there.  My cousins and I have slowly been making it part of our present.  Many of us have visited the country, and some of us have made the effort to reconnect with the culture.

My first trip back to Estonia was also my first trip overseas.  It was also my first cycling tour, and I was travelling solo.  The first day of my tour I was terrified.  I was so worried I was making myself sick.  I thought I would get lost.  I thought I would hurt myself.  I thought I would run out of steam and have to stop before I reached my hotel for the night.  I was almost certain I was going to have to call someone to rescue me.

But I made it to my hotel.  At one point in time I thought I might have been lost, but it turned out I wasn’t.  I didn’t hurt myself.  I had enough stamina to even survive a side-trip to a golf club for lunch.

And there I was, at the end of the first leg of my journey, sitting on the balcony outside my room in the only hotel in a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere.  I felt an incredible sense of achievement.  I felt like I could conquer the world.

I *could* do this.  I *can* do this.  I *am* doing this!

This was the most audacious adventure I had ever attempted, and I felt like I could actually survive it.

There were some barn swallow nests under the eaves of the balcony on which I was sitting.  As I sat there, feeling exhausted yet empowered, I watched the swallows shoot out from underneath me, swoop into the air, weave in and out of each other in an amazing display of aerial acrobatics and dive back under the balcony.

I could see why the Estonians chose this little bird, of all things, to be a symbol of their country.  It was small, it was commonplace, it was simple – but it was also bold, elegant, full of life and the embodiment of freedom.

It was beautiful.  It was magnificent.

The beauty of a barn swallow is different to the beauty of a swan or lorikeet.  The magnificence of a barn swallow is different to the magnificence of a hawk or falcon.  It is so small, delicate and compact – so fragile.  And yet there is a power in that bird.  You only need to see it shoot out into space and swoop in a high, fast arc to see that.

I can see why the Estonians would want to see something of themselves in that bird - why they would want to see something of that bird in themselves.  It made sense that they would put it on their 500 Kroon note, and it was such a shame that the design on that note stopped being in common circulation when Estonia changed its currency to the Euro.

The picture of a barn swallow on the 500 Kroon note is one of the best images of a swallow I have ever seen.  It does such a magnificent job of capturing the elegance and power of that little bird.

That pose.  That poise.  I wanted the spirit of that bird – the essence of it – to be the first image I had had tattooed onto my body.  And it almost was.

Maybe one day it will be.  Somewhere, under the skin, I think it already is.