Black ink swallow tattoo with patterned wing and body detailing, shown on a section of skin on the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental swallow on torso

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single swallow in flight is drawn in black outline, with its wings and body filled with decorative swirls, dots and paisley-like curls. The linework is even and the shading is solid black with no visible grey wash. The bird sits off-centre on a plain, softly lit area of skin, with the tail and wingtips extending to the lower left.

Traditional Other Swallow Bird

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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

Sit closer, the wind off the salt flats gets into anyone who sits still too long. You asked about the swallow with the painted wings, so I will tell you how she came by them, and you will not interrupt me, because I am old and my teeth are already tired.

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Out past the Dunmore turn there was a fuel stop run by a woman called Hester Vane, who had lace-maker's hands and no patience for men who parked on her gravel. In spring the swallows came down the road in their hundreds, skimming the dust for midges. Hester fed the one with the torn tail from a spoon of sugar water, and she called it Thimble, because it fitted in a cupped palm like one.

One August a storm rolled up from the south and the single telephone line to town went dead. A carter named Emmet Crane came in with a crate of cracked melons and a letter that had to reach the doctor in Sallow before morning, for a child with a fever in the back of his lorry. Hester tied the letter to Thimble with a thread of linen, then drew swirls and dots across the bird's wings with a pen dipped in walnut ink, so the markings would look like the ripples the wind leaves in sand, the kind nobody can read but everybody trusts.

Thimble flew it through the dust in forty minutes, and the doctor was on the road with his bag before the rain came down. Hester never got the wings clean again, and nobody on that road ever asked her to.