Black linework tattoo of a bird in flight with outstretched wings on the inner forearm, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird in flight on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single bird with outstretched wings is drawn in black ink, shown in flight from a near-horizontal angle. The wings are built from tapering strokes and feather-like marks, with a thin tail and a clean outline. The tattoo sits on pale skin against a soft, dark background, and the photograph has a warm, filtered look.

Fine line Forearm Bird Swallow Wing Flight

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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

The function room at the Crown smelled of carpet shampoo and somebody's vanilla candle, and I had been standing by the raffle table for twenty minutes when Maureen Pilling told me I hadn't changed a bit. Nobody else from 4B had turned up. Then the door swung open and Sadie Okafor came in with a bottle of cheap Prosecco tucked under one arm, still holding her pencil the way she used to in Mr Dyson's art room, as though it might bolt.

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We had drawn swallows in the margins of our geography books for two years. Hers always banked left, mine always flew straight off the page. Mr Dyson said a swallow could sleep on the wing, so every bird we drew had to look like it was nodding off mid-flight. Sadie insisted the wings should taper like a good brush stroke, thick at the shoulder and gone by the tip. We drew them on bus tickets, on her mum's shopping lists, and on the inside of the bike shed door until the caretaker painted it grey.

She poured two plastic cups of fizz and we talked about the quarry and the summer we were sixteen, when we were certain the swifts would wait for us. Then she opened her handbag and unfolded a square of paper gone soft at the creases. It was a swallow, dated the last day of Year 11, in biro nearly worn through at one wing. She had meant to give it to me at the leavers' disco and lost her nerve.

I turned it over. On the back, in my own careless hand, was a bird flying straight into the edge of the page, and I had forgotten I ever drew it. Sadie tapped the crooked wing with one nail. "Still no sense of direction," she said. I laughed so hard the lady at the raffle table looked over, and I kept the paper in my coat pocket all evening, the two birds facing different ways.