Pencil drawing of a stylised swallow in flight with ornamental scrollwork and dot patterns across the wings and body, designed as a tattoo.

Ornate swallow flash drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a swallow in flight, with long pointed wings and forked tail feathers swept back to the right. The wings and body are filled with swirling scrollwork, dotted lines, small cross motifs and scalloped patterns, drawn with fine graphite shading. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain white background, with the bird's head at the lower left.

Traditional Swallow Bird Scrollwork Swirl Dot Feather

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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

The swallows came back to the Ouse the same week the ice left the lock gates, and by the third morning they had claimed the cabin roof as though you had asked them. Tessa swore they were after the warm flue. You said they were after the crumbs off your bread. Neither of you believed the other, which was how the two of you had run the Marigold Ruth for eleven years.

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The nest went up under the gunwale above the coal hatch, a neat mud cup the birds patched every dusk. You watched the parents work from the tiller, banking hard over the wake and slicing back into the wind with their forked tails opened like tailor's shears. Tessa had carved the scrollwork on the cabin doors herself, curls and dots and little crosses, and she liked to say the swallows had read it and approved. You thought they were just hungry for the midges rising off the water.

In June the chicks outgrew the cup and one went over the side at Naburn lock. You heard the thin cry before you saw it, a grey scrap turning on the brown water. You knelt on the wet gunwale and lifted it out with a tea towel, and it sat on your palm with its pale throat working, too frightened to be grateful. When you set it on the tiller it shook, dropped an inch, then caught the air as if it had been waiting its whole life for permission. It went low across the lock cut and up over the willows.

Tessa came up from the engine with oil on her hands and asked where it had gone. You said it had gone to Hull to see about a job. She laughed, then stopped, and looked at the empty cup under the roof for a long while. Next spring, you told yourself, they would be back. You left the cabin window open anyway.