Black ink ornamental swallow tattoo in flight across the side of the ribs, with patterned wings and dotwork detail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental swallow on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is drawn in bold black outline, with its wings and body filled with lace-like patterns, scrolls and rows of small dots. The linework is clean and the fill is solid black with no grey shading, set against lightly reddened skin on the side of the torso. The bird is shown in profile and fills most of the frame, angled diagonally from lower left to upper right.

Traditional Dotwork Ribs Swallow Bird Filigree Dot Scroll Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow had got into the lace shop again, and you found it on the sill above the bobbins at half past seven, wings folded tight as a pair of shears. Mrs Ashdown had already unlocked the door and gone through to the back to put the kettle on, so it was only you and the bird and the grey light coming off the square. You cupped your hands around it the way your father taught you to carry a wren out of the barn, and felt the small hot heart going like a clock wound too far.

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Out on the step it did not go at once. It sat in your palm, then hopped to the rail and looked at the pattern you had been pricking onto card all winter, the scrolls and the rows of pinholes meant for the Whitsun veil. Mrs Ashdown had sworn the design came from her grandmother's sampler, but you had never seen a sampler with a bird in it. The swallow lifted off and went over the chapel roof toward the mill chimney, its tail opening like a fan of black thread.

The commission came in April from the Pargeter sisters, who wanted a veil for a wedding at St Hilda's that would hold a bird in its hem. You worked it through May with the lamp pulled close, every feather a row of tiny knots, and when Mrs Ashdown finally held it to the window she said nothing for a long while. Then she tapped the place near the edge where you had left a gap. "That's where it'll sit," she said. "Don't fill it in."

Swallows came back to the eaves of the shop every spring after that, and in June you would hear them scraping at the mud above the door before the light was up. You never filled the gap. On mornings when the square was quiet you liked to think of the bird still out there over the mill, going round and round a pattern nobody else could see.