Black and grey traditional swallow tattoo with a sunburst and wave lines on the inner forearm, photographed over a printed page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and sun over waves on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight sits in front of a rayed sun, with stylised waves along the bottom of the design. The linework is bold and dark, with solid black areas on the bird and fine stippled shading on the water and sun rays. The tattoo is photographed close up on skin, with a printed page of text behind it.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Sun Sunburst Wave Sea

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

Old Dinah Freel swore the swallow came aboard at Grimsby, a day out from the Dogger Bank, and sat on the tiller like it had paid for the passage. Nobody argued. A bird that size didn't eat much, and the crew of the Fair Margaret had been three weeks at sea on salt cod and each other's sulks.

Keep reading

The bird rode with them through a week of grey squalls. When the boat was low in the water and the wind backed round to the north-east, it flew ahead of the bow in long, tight loops, always the same distance off, then dropped to skim the crests as if it were checking the water for them. Dinah said it was reading the sea. Young Tom Harrower said it was a bird and wanted its supper. They scattered crumbs on the hatch cover and it took them, and that was the end of the argument.

On the eighth morning the cloud tore open low in the east and the sun came up red as a coal, throwing rays across the swell like the spokes of a wheel. The bird climbed into the glare and turned, once, twice, and then the skipper saw what it had been steering them around: a black back of rock just under the surface, where the chart said there was nothing at all.

They hauled wide and lived. Tom says the bird went on ahead and was never seen again. Dinah says it still turns up each spring over the harbour wall, and that the sun is only the sun, but the swallow knew where the shallows lay. Tom has his own opinion on that, and he has been watching the sky over the wall ever since.