Black and grey shaded swallow in flight tattooed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey swallow in flight

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single swallow with outstretched wings is shown in flight, angled diagonally across the skin. The bird is rendered in black ink with soft grey shading on the wings and body, and fine feather lines around the tail and wingtips. The plain skin background keeps the tattoo as the clear focus of the frame.

Chest Swallow Bird 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

Mind the step, boy, the frost gets into these boards by November and takes the skin off your heel if you're careless. Sit by the range and I'll tell you about the swallows, since you've been asking why the barn's gone so quiet.

Keep reading

There were nine of them nesting under the hay loft beam at Hollin Farm the year old Mr Ashdown lost his wife. Every spring they came back from Africa with the dust of it still on their wings, and every autumn they went again, and nobody on that farm ever asked them why. The smallest had a notch in her tail where a hawk had tried her once. Ashdown called her Nettle and fed her crumbs off his palm.

The winter he went to the hospital in Leeds, the barn was cold as a church and the others should have been gone a month. But Nettle stayed. She sat on the frayed rope of the pulley through all the snow, and when the milk boy came up the lane she didn't dive at him. She just turned her head towards the door, the way a collie does when it wants you to follow.

So the boy followed her out into the white, across the top field to the old gatepost. There, half buried in drift, lay Mr Ashdown, who had come home from Leeds early on the bus and walked the last mile in the dark, and had gone down a yard short of his own door. Nettle settled on the post above him, wings half open, as if she was keeping count until somebody came.