Two matching blue swallow tattoos with sketchy linework and blue shading, one on each inner wrist.

Matching blue swallows on both wrists

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Two mirrored swallows in flight sit on the inner wrists, one on each arm, with the wings and tails angled outwards. The linework is loose and sketched, with blue ink filling the wings, body and tail feathers and leaving pale skin showing through as highlights. The composition is centred on each wrist, with a lace top and dark denim visible behind the arms.

Traditional Other Swallow Bird Wing Matching

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 came back to Hollin Fen the same week the banns were read, which the old women said was a good sign, though they could not agree on what it signified. Ada Pryor took it for herself. She had watched the pair build their mud nest under the chapel eaves every summer since she was small, and she knew the two birds never flew far from one another, not even in the wet months when the rest of the flock thinned out.

Keep reading

On the morning of the wedding her father found them perched on the lych gate, one facing east and one facing west, their wings spread the same wide way as if they had practised. Nan Irons, who had buried three husbands and enjoyed each funeral, told him it was a bad omen for the groom. Swallows that sit apart, she said, have gone looking for something better. Her father said the birds had no business in the churchyard at all, and went to fetch the cart.

Silas Kemp was late to the church, and not for any reason he would own. He had walked the long way round by the drove, past the pond where he had once tried to catch a swallow in his cap to prove he could. He arrived with mud on his boots and a cracked blue shell in his coat pocket, and when Ada asked what had kept him he only shrugged and said the reeds were full of things that needed looking after.

They married under the eaves with the swallows crossing overhead. That evening, when the lamps were lit in the barn and the fiddler had gone home, Ada went out to the gate alone. The two birds were still there, one facing each way, and when she came close they lifted together and wheeled up over the roof, so near that their wingtips almost touched. She did not need Nan Irons to tell her which way to read that.