Black and grey realistic tattoo of a swallow in flight with spread wings, placed on the side of the ribs.

Swallow in flight on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird, likely a swallow, is shown mid-flight with its wings spread and tail forked. The shading is soft and smooth, with darker wing feathers, lighter greys on the body and fine detail on the head. The bird sits diagonally across the side of the ribs against plain skin and a dark top.

Realism Ribs Swallow Bird Wing Flight

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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

Leave the stove alone, it's still giving back what I fed it at four. Pass me that tin. You want the swallow story, then you'll hold your tongue till the kettle sings and stop poking at the lamp like your mother does.

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Harriet Vane had the Maud Ellery loaded with coal for Ely when the first swallows came down the cut in April, low over the water, forking the air like they were stitching it shut behind them. She swore they were the same pair that had nested in the wheelhouse the summer before. Nonsense, I told her, birds don't know one barge from another. Still, a grey swallow rode the bow rail all the way from Bishop's Stortford and wouldn't be shifted, and Harriet fed it crumbs off her palm like a parish priest with his flock.

Then the lock keeper at Denver sent word that the weir was up and the river was running brown and fast, and nobody sensible was going through. Harriet went through anyway, because Mrs Ellery's coal had been promised and Harriet never once broke a promise in her life. Halfway down the reach the swallow lifted off the rail, flew straight at the cut ahead, dipped and wheeled and dropped back, dipped and wheeled again, until she understood it was showing her the deep water and the shallow bar with its quick low turns. She followed it through with a fair bit of swearing.

She never named the bird, and it came back to the wheelhouse every spring after that until the spring she died. We put a saucer of crumbs on the cabin roof for the funeral. The swallows came over the water that April, the same as always, and one of them flew straight past the bow without landing. I'd like to think it was saying goodbye. Mostly I think it was hungry.