Black and grey drawing of a stylised bird in flight with swept wings and a long curling tail, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bird in flight design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised bird with its wings swept back and a long, curling tail, drawn as a single outline on a plain white background. The linework tapers into long feather strokes, and soft grey shading sits along the body and wings to give depth. The image is black and grey only and is centred with no other elements.

Bird Swallow Wing Tail

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 guard at the stone bridge asked Ilse what she was carrying, and she told him a bird, which was true. He lifted the lid of her basket, found only folded linen and the heel of a loaf, and waved her on towards the far bank where the river ran brown and fast under the second arch.

Keep reading

The bird rode in her collar, its long tail curling down her back like a ribbon of smoke. Her grandmother had found it years before on the wrong side of the water, a swallow with a wing that would not heal straight, and had sung to it every night until it could lift itself again. It had never flown north. It only circled the orchard, and the village took this as a sign that it was waiting for someone.

Ilse reached the willows as the chapel bell began. A woman in a grey shawl stood by the water with one hand pressed flat to her mouth. Ilse unbuttoned her collar, and the swallow went up off her shoulder in one long sweep, wings swept back, tail unspooling over the reeds. The woman did not speak. She only followed the bird with her eyes until it was a dark mark against the far hills.

The swallow came back at dusk, low over the water, and one of its long tail feathers was gone. Tied to the bare quill with red thread was a slip of paper in a hand Ilse knew from her childhood, a hand that had written only two words: come over.