Small solid black silhouettes of five swallows in flight on the side of a woman's ribs, photographed from behind with one arm raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five swallows in flight on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Five small black swallows are arranged in a loose diagonal flight pattern on the side of the ribcage, with their wings in varied positions. The birds are rendered as solid silhouettes with no shading, and the ink is crisp against the skin. The photograph is taken from behind and to the side, with blonde hair, a dark cloth held against the body and a wall in the background.

Ribs Swallow Bird Flight Silhouette

Find an artist for this

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 big top came down in Thetford on the last Sunday of September, and by then the swallows had been gone from the fields a fortnight. Five of them stayed on in the rigging above the ring, and Dad counted them every evening from the caravan step the way he used to count the takings. Mrs Okonkwo said they were the only audience we had left that never asked for a refund.

Keep reading

I flew the last season alone. Dad's knees had gone and the rest of the troupe had taken jobs at a garden centre in Diss, so it was me on the bar, twice a night, with the drum roll coming up through the boards and nobody in the seats but the wind. The swallows watched from the tent poles. They never flew in a straight line. They tipped and dropped and caught the draught off the canvas, then climbed back up to the same beam, as if the whole show had been rehearsed for them alone.

On the final night I stopped halfway through the swing, let go of the bar, and caught it again on the way back, which I had never once done in twenty years. Somebody in the back row started clapping, though I am still not sure it was a person. When I came down, the five birds were already lifting off the rigging in their loose diagonal, out through the flap and over the lorries, and I stood in the sawdust until the last one was a dot above the petrol station on the A140.