Realistic blue and grey swallow in flight on the upper back, with small black stars scattered around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and stars on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed across the upper back, with its wings spread upwards and its body angled towards the left. The bird is rendered in soft realistic shading, with blue-teal tones on the head and body and grey feather detail on the wings. Small black stars are scattered around the bird on the bare skin, and the photograph is taken from behind, showing only the back of the head and an ear.

Realism Back Swallow Bird Star

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

Mind the step, it's still wet from the flour sacks, and keep that cat off the proving boards. Right. Where was I? Ah, the swallow. You'll want to know how a bird came to live over Mrs Fenwick's oven, and the answer is that nobody invited her. She came in through the gap above the chimney where the brick had gone soft, the way they always do, and she stayed because the bread was warm and the cold was not.

Keep reading

Every morning before the ovens were lit, Tom the baker's boy would climb onto the crate under the skylight and count the stars. Seven, eight, nine, until the bird woke and dropped from the rafters to pick crumbs from the cooling rack. When the last star went out, the swallow went out with it, flying up through the glass to the sky over the harbour. Mrs Fenwick said that was the only clock she trusted. The bread was never burnt on a morning when Tom had counted properly.

One October the bird did not come down. Tom counted every dawn through the frost and the fog, and the sky stayed empty above the racks. He began leaving a heel of rye on the sill each night, just in case. Mrs Fenwick told him swallows fly south for the winter, that they have far to go and no map but the stars. Tom said he knew that, he'd just like to be ready.

In April, when the cherry blossom was spitting pink on the lane, the swallow landed on the sill with a scrap of dust on her wing and stood there eating the rye as though she had only stepped out for a moment. Tom counted the stars. Four left, three, two. The ovens roared into life behind him. And the bird, who had never once asked permission, looked at the bread and then at the boy, and stayed.