Small black and grey swallow tattoo in flight on the skin behind a person's ear, in a traditional style with fine linework.

Small swallow tattoo behind the ear

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in mid-flight sits on the skin behind the ear, with its wings and tail outlined in dark line and shaded in grey. The bird is shown in profile, angled towards the lower right, against softly lit skin and fine hair. The composition is close and tightly cropped on the ear and the tattoo.

Traditional Fine line Neck Swallow Bird

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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 in off the estuary the week the fish market flooded, skimming the tin roofs of the stalls as if they were checking the water level. My uncle Ferris swore they were the same birds that nested under the pier at Brixham, and that a swallow on your skin meant you had come home from the sea in one piece. He said it over a crate of wet mackerel while the rain ran off the awning in ropes, and I didn't argue, because I'd heard it since I was small and the rain was too loud to argue over.

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The man who did the work on the back of Ferris's neck was called Dessie, and he kept his needles in a biscuit tin that had once carried shortbread from Aberdeen. He drew the swallow freehand on a scrap of tracing paper, turned it over twice, and said the bird should be going downhill, not up, because a swallow that climbs is only showing off. Ferris laughed so hard the chair rocked. Then he went quiet and asked for the wings to be shaded darker on the top, so it would look like it had come through weather.

When the rain stopped the gulls came back to the harbour wall and the stalls steamed in the low sun. Ferris paid in coins and folded his collar down. He said he could feel the bird now, a small weight on the skin, pointed at the sea. I thought it was a strange thing to be carrying all the way down to the quay, but the swallows were already gone east, low over the water, and he was watching them with the same look he gave the tide tables.