Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile face and swallow in a dotted circle

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style tattoo shows a woman's face in profile with red lips and a heavy dark brow, with a swallow in flight across the lower half of the design. A ring of yellow dots surrounds the motif, and faint scrollwork lettering appears at the left edge of the frame. Bold black outlines contrast with flat teal, orange and grey shading on the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Profile Face Swallow Bird Dot Lip Scrollwork

Find an artist for this

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 Carrow Keep the same week the stonemason's boy went missing, which my mother said was no coincidence, only weather. She stood in the bailey with her red lacquered compact open, dabbing her lips while the birds stitched the sky above the broken curtain wall.

Keep reading

Nobody had lived in the keep since the flood took the lower ward. What remained was a round chapel window with no glass left in it, and a ring of brass studs set into the stone where the lord's shields once hung. My brother Owen and I climbed up every evening that summer to count them with our thumbs. Forty-one. Mother said the number was a lie told by masons who wanted paying twice.

The swallow had a nest under the lintel, a mud cup the size of a teacup. One evening it dropped a grey feather into the dry font, and Owen fished it out, grinning, and said it was the boy's, that he had turned into a bird to get out of the water. I told him that was the kind of thing a person says when they have run out of true things. He didn't argue. He held the feather up against the sunset until the light came through it like a pane of glass.

In September the nest was empty and the studs numbered forty-two. Owen had pressed one more into the stone with the heel of his hand, a cold yellow bead of brass he'd pulled from the river silt. I didn't tell Mother. She was already at the gate, face turned towards the lane, pale mouth lifting as if she could hear the cart coming back up the hill with him in it.