Small black and grey tattoo of a swallow in flight, with soft shading on the wings, on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in flight in black and grey

Fine line · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed in black ink on pale skin. The wings are rendered with fine, soft shading that fades toward the tips, and the body and tail are picked out in darker tones. The bird sits off-centre in a large area of empty skin, which leaves plenty of negative space around it.

Fine line Swallow Bird

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp, it's the last oil we've got. You'll have heard the stories about the Grey Years, when the sky was a lid and nothing flew above the scrub. Nobody believed the old women who said they'd once seen a swallow cut across the sun. I believed them. My grandmother kept a feather in a tin under her bed.

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Down by the cistern at Harrow Wells lived a girl called Ysolde Penny, who could not stop looking up. Her mother sold brass fittings to the salt traders and had no patience for daydreamers. One evening in late summer the light went low and copper, and there it was: a small dark shape, forked tail open like a pair of scissors, dropping and rising over the old water tower. It did not stop to look for anything. It simply went where the air was good, leaning into the wind as if the wind were an old friend.

She ran after it for three miles, over fences and rubble, until the bird wheeled out past the last ridge and slipped into the haze. Her brother found her sitting in the dust, laughing and bleeding from both knees, with a grey feather pinched between her fingers. She said it had dropped right at her feet, as if it had decided she was worth the trouble.

So what do I say to that? I say the bird didn't know it was rare. It didn't know it was the only thing left making a shape in all that empty sky. It only knew how to turn. Now hush, the lamp is going, and I've a long walk back to my own bed.