Black line drawing of a stylised swallow in flight with ornamental knotwork, scrollwork and mechanical-looking details, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate swallow line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised swallow is shown in flight with outstretched wings and a forked tail, drawn in black outline on a white background. The wings and body are filled with fine scrollwork, knotwork, feather patterns and small circular motifs, with a cog-like detail at the centre of the body. The composition is a single centred figure with no shading, and the lines are even and uniform throughout.

Swallow Bird Wing Knotwork Scrollwork Feather Gear

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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 fire's only good for a few more minutes and I'm not going to shout over it. Yes, the bird. The bird is the reason anyone remembers the Fennimore Travelling Wonders at all, and by the summer I was seven the big top had more patches than canvas and the lions had gone to a farmer near Ely.

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Abel Crewe built the swallow in a winter when the fen was frozen solid. Brass wings, a forked tail of blued steel, and at its breast a little cog that Abel swore kept the time of the band's drum. Every dusk he wound it with a key he wore on a ribbon round his neck, and the thing rose off the wire above the sawdust and went the whole length of the tent, wings opening like a fan, while the children counted its beats and forgot the cold.

Then came the year the takings fell away to nothing, and a man from Leeds with a bigger tent and a bigger purse bought the paper on the wagons. The sale was set for the Monday. On the Sunday night the swallow would not fly. Abel turned the key until his knuckles bled, and the cog only ticked and stopped, ticked and stopped, like a heart that couldn't decide.

We found the wire empty on the Monday morning, and a tear in the canvas the width of a man's arm. Abel said nothing. He never did say what he'd done with the key. Some autumns later a drover swore he saw a swallow keeping pace with the geese over the Wash, wings flashing bright as sunlight on water, and he said it never once landed.