Fine line geometric swallow tattoo in black ink on the side of a person's ribs, with cream fabric wrapped across the upper torso.

Geometric swallow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is drawn in thin black lines built from straight, angular segments, with the wings and tail formed from faceted shapes. It sits on the side of the ribcage, and a cream fabric wrapped across the upper body partly covers the frame. The tattoo is black ink only, with crisp lines on soft skin set against a blurred dark background of horizontal slats.

Fine line Geometric Ribs Swallow Bird Geometric Line art

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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

Hold still and mind the trowel, love. No, the other end. There, that's the bird I was telling you about, the one that flew out of Mr Pell's ledger. You can't see the creases now, but in my mother's day you could still make them out if you held the paper up to the glasshouse light.

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Pell kept everything measured. Rows of leeks, rainfall in a tin cup, the exact length of the south wall in chains and poles. His daughter Ida was the opposite. She loved the swallows that nested under the potting-shed eaves, and every spring her father had the boards nailed across to keep them out. So she folded birds from the seed catalogues instead, one a morning, with corners sharp as a set square, because she'd been taught her geometry and could never manage a curve. She left them on the bench where he'd see them, and he swept them into the stove without once looking up.

Then came the August the orchard was sold, and he sat up all night at the bench with the ledger, adding and subtracting, meaning to burn the lot before the buyers arrived. Ida came down in her nightdress and found him stopped, staring at a folded bird pressed flat between two pages of rainfall figures. He hadn't burned it. He hadn't burned any of them. The swallows came back that spring regardless, cutting the air between the glasshouse and the pear wall as if somebody had signed them a lease.

He never boarded the eaves again. When he died they found the ledger in the bottom drawer, every one of her birds kept flat, and the last one still pointing south, the way they all do in autumn. So when a swallow comes down the lane in March, you leave the shed door open. Now pass me the twine.