Close photo of a small black bird tattoo on a woman's forearm as her hand rests in the pocket of pale blue jeans.

Small bird tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black bird, likely a swallow, is tattooed on the outer forearm near the wrist, shown in dark ink with simple outlined wings. The image is a close crop of a hand in a jeans pocket, with a white cropped top and a silver ring on one finger. The palette is neutral, with the tattoo as the only ink and the pale blue denim and white wall dominating the rest of the frame.

Forearm Bird Swallow Hand Jeans Ring

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

You have been sweeping the cloister since Lauds, and the swallows are back under the infirmary eaves, two of them squabbling over the mud shelf you spent a wet March patching. Brother Anselm says the birds keep better time than the abbot. Last spring the pair above the lavatorium never returned, and the novices took it as a sign, though you blame the tabby that sleeps on the warm stones by the well.

Keep reading

The letter comes on the Tuesday carrier, tucked inside a bundle of tallow candles from Hull. It is addressed in a hand you half remember, the hand that once wrote out the rota for the fishing boats your father crewed before the sea took him. The seal is already broken. Someone in the post room has read it, or the damp has done the work. You carry it out to the wall where the swallows dip and rise over the herb beds, and you read it twice standing up, because sitting down would make it true.

It says a boat called the Gannet Mercy has been found drifting off Spurn with its nets still wet, and a single brass ring on the tiller chain engraved with your father's initials. Nothing else. No body, no word. You fold the page small and push it into your sleeve. Above you a swallow lands on the lip of its nest, looks down with its forked tail flicking, and slips inside without a sound.

That evening you climb the bell tower for the vespers rope and find the ring already there, hung from a nail by someone who knew you would come looking. Anselm is humming in the choir stalls below. You thread the ring onto a cord and hang it round your neck, and in the morning the mud shelf is still warm where the birds sat, though the nest is quiet and the sky over the orchard is already empty.