Black line drawing of a stylised swallow in flight with scrolled wings and curled tail feathers, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised swallow line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a swallow in flight, with long swept wings and forked tail feathers. The wings and body are filled with flowing curls and scroll shapes drawn in uniform, clean linework. The image is flat black on white, with no shading or colour, and the design fills the frame with a centred composition.

Swallow Bird Wing Scroll Curl

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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 over the Lincolnshire fields the week my uncle lost the gallopers to the bailiffs, and he said they were a bad omen, which is why he sent me up the ladder with a pot of black size and a brush no wider than a fingernail. I was fourteen. I could already do a scroll on a cart's tailboard, the curl that starts fat and tapers to nothing, like a wave going out.

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Nobody paid me to paint the birds. Those were mine, on the back of the dodgem booth where the lamps didn't reach. Swallows always come back to the same barn, my mother said, which was her way of telling me the fair would come back too, though it never did in the same shape. We moved on from Boston to Skegness to Hull with the same three lorries and the same ticket man, who counted his change on his tongue.

The turn came in Hull at the end of September, when the wind off the Humber took the canvas off the big top in one long sheet. I was on the caravan roof with the last of the size. Looking down, I saw the whole fair spread out like a page I had never finished, every curl drawn in the same clean black, and I understood my uncle had never sent me up for the paint. He wanted someone to keep the shapes straight while the rest of us came apart.

In spring I painted a swallow on the yard gate in Hull. The ticket man, still counting on his tongue, said it was the only thing on the site that didn't look like it wanted to leave. I told him that was the point of a swallow. It leaves, and then it finds its way back to the wall it knows.