Pencil drawing of a flying swallow with scrolling flourishes trailing behind it, shaded in grey, drawn on white paper, a flash design for a tattoo.

Pencil swallow with swirling tail on paper

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a swallow in flight, facing left, with shaded wings and a rounded head. Its tail breaks into curling, scroll-like flourishes that sweep up and to the right. The drawing is in grey graphite with soft shading on the wings and body, placed centrally on white paper over a grid cutting mat.

Traditional Swallow Bird Flourish Scroll Swirl

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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 ladder wobbles on the third rung of the Conference trees, and you hold the pear basket against your hip while the wasps circle the windfalls. Nan's old wicker is full already. Down the row, the swallows have been dropping through the gap between the barn roof and the hedge all afternoon, flicking up again with those forked tails, as if someone had drawn them in pencil and then rubbed out half the lines.

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Harold from the farm next door says they're gathering for the south. He says it every August, and every August he's half right. You don't argue. You watch one bird hang over the far wall, wings tilted, its tail breaking into curls that stream out behind it like the ribbon Nan used to unpick from parcels and keep in the sideboard drawer. She kept everything. The drawer still smells of camphor and sugar.

When the last basket is carried to the cart, you find a tangle of baler twine by the gate and work it into the shapes you saw, one loop for every lift of a wing. It doesn't hold. Nothing you make holds the way a swallow does. But you knot the ends to the gatepost anyway, and at dusk the birds go over, dozens of them, and each one seems to pull a little something loose from the air behind it.

By morning the twine is gone, taken, you suppose, by a wren with more sense than you. The gate swings on its hinge. The pears will keep in the cold shed until November, and when you open the sideboard drawer there is one blue ribbon sitting on top of the camphor, still curled the way she left it.