Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Infinity symbol with four swallows

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a single infinity symbol drawn in a bold, tapering black stroke that thins where the loop crosses itself. Four small black swallows in flight trail off from the right-hand end of the symbol, decreasing in size as they rise. The image is a solid black-on-white silhouette with no shading or colour, and the subject is centred with generous empty space around it.

Infinity Swallow Bird Symbol

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 swallows left the wire at twenty past four, the way they had every September since the ferry at Cowes went down. You counted them from the post office window, four of them, the last one always lagging, and Mrs Ferris swore that was the bird which had come back from Africa with a broken wing and never caught up.

Keep reading

Your job was the sounder in the back room of Haddon Cross telegraph office, where the wires ran from the station to the coast and back again in one long loop, so that nothing sent from Haddon ever quite arrived anywhere but home. On Tuesday Dorothy Lane brought in a telegram folded twice, addressed to a man at Penhallow who had been buried since Easter. She wanted it sent anyway. 'He'll get it when the birds come round,' she said, and you did not argue, because the line was yours to send.

You tapped it out letter by letter: RETURNING AS PROMISED STOP ALL WELL STOP. It went down the wire, through the junction at Taunton, and came back up through the same dots, because the circuit was looped so that a message always reached its sender's own sounder before it finished. You heard your own hand echo in the receiver, faint and exact, and then the clatter stopped.

Outside, the swallows lifted off the line in a ragged thread, thinning as they climbed, the last one turning once above the chimneys before it went. Dorothy paid you a shilling and went home without looking back. You wrote the receipt in your neat hand and filed the flimsy, and when you looked up again the wire was empty, but it still hummed.