Traditional style tattoo of a black swallow pierced by an arrow with red, yellow and teal accents, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and arrow on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black swallow with outstretched wings is pierced by a brown arrow with teal and yellow fletching, with yellow and orange curling scrolls and black drips below. The wings use detailed black shading with grey highlights, set against a solid red backdrop. Colour ink dominates the design, and the tattoo fills the frame on a close-up photo of the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird Arrow Wing Scroll Drip

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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 back to the cut the same week the coal boat went down below Hawford lock, which my mother said was a sign and my father said was the weather. I was nine, sat on the cabin roof with a tin of boiled sweets, counting birds as they dropped low over the black water and snapped up whatever the day had shaken loose.

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Uncle Dennis kept the Marigold moored under the bridge and had a swallow inked on his forearm, wings flung wide, a brass arrow through its breast. He said the arrow was for the lock keeper who'd docked him a week's pay in 1961, and the bird was for getting home. He never could decide which part was the joke. Each spring he rubbed the solid red patch around it and said the bird was tired but it always came back.

The summer I turned twelve he handed me the tiller on a still evening, the water so flat the willows hung upside down in it. I steered her past the Tewkesbury moorings with the wind getting up behind us. A swallow skimmed the bow, clipped the bank and shot under the bridge arch, and I swore I saw a flash of teal and yellow on its tail before it was gone.

Dennis drowned the following winter, when the river came up brown over the towpath. We found the Marigold tied where he'd left her, and on the cabin table a note in capitals: TELL THE LOCK KEEPER THE ACCOUNT IS SQUARE. I did, in the end. He laughed until he had to sit down, then paid me in tea and a slice of cake, and I have never seen a swallow fly low over that water without lifting my hand to it.