Small black and grey fine line swallow tattoo in flight on the side of a neck, with a dangling teal earring nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in flight on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the side of the neck, shown in profile with its wings swept upward. The bird is drawn in fine black linework with shaded and stippled detail across the wings and body. The image is in black and grey, with a soft, out-of-focus background of dark hair and a hanging earring with a teal stone.

Fine line Dotwork Neck Swallow Bird Wing Flight

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

The swallows came to the rigging off the Azores, three days after we had lost sight of any land that had a name. Old Tobiah Crane swore they were the same birds that nested under the eaves of St Ives harbour, and that they had followed the Mary Ellen out past the reef on purpose. Nobody believed him, but nobody threw them off the deck either, and when the wind dropped we sat on the hatch and watched them stitch the grey air above the mast.

Keep reading

The boy who had signed on at Penzance was called Jory, and he had never been further than the breakwater. He kept a pencil stub in his cap and drew the birds on the back of a chart: their forked tails, their wings swept back like the blades of a scythe. When the cook asked what he meant to do with them, he said he meant to give one to his mother, who had sold the cottage and gone to live in Truro with her sister.

On the last night of the calm, Jory pricked a swallow onto Tobiah's shoulder with a sail needle and a bottle of Indian ink, working by lantern light. The old man did not flinch. When it was done he held his arm up to the glass and said the bird looked fast enough to outrun the weather. In the morning the breeze came up from the south-west, and the swallows turned as one and were gone east towards the coast we had left behind.