Black ink swallow tattoo with swirling ornamental detail on the side of the ribs, shown on tanned skin.

Ornamental swallow on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single swallow in flight is outlined in black ink, with its wings and body filled with swirls, dots and scrolling patterns. The linework is bold and even, with the interior detailing built from fine dark marks rather than shading. The tattoo sits small and centred on tanned skin, with fabric visible at the top left of the frame.

Traditional Ribs Swallow Bird Swirl Dot

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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

Keep your boots off the hearth, the lot of you, and listen, because the snow has shut the lane and I have nothing better to do than talk. Last winter, when the drifts climbed over the sill of the Plough at Haddow Cross, a swallow flew in through the broken shutter of the back room. Nobody had seen a swallow in December. Mrs Pell swore it was a ghost. My aunt swore it was a bird that had lost its way south and had the good sense to stop.

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The bird had wings worked all over like the lace on a Sunday collar, scrolls and little dots pricked into the feathers, as if someone had sat up nights with a needle and a lamp. It perched on the cold ledge above the bar and looked at the ostler's boy as if he owed it money. He fed it crumbs of bread soaked in cider. By morning it had gone, and the only sign left was a single black feather on the flagstones, patterned just like its wings.

The boy kept that feather in a tobacco tin. Years later, a grown man with a carrier's cart and a daughter at the coaching road school, he opened the tin one thaw and found a folded slip of paper he had never seen before. It said only, in a hand nobody in the village knew: the swallow remembers the way back. He never learned who had written it, but every March after, he left the back shutter open a crack, and every March something small and quick came through it.