Teal hatched illustration of a swallow in flight on a white background, presented as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow in flight, teal illustration

Colour · Flash

A single swallow is shown in side view, wings swept back and tail forked, with its body in flat teal. Fine hatched strokes create texture on the wings and belly, while lighter areas suggest highlights. The bird is centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

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

Mind the step, it's gone soft, same as your grandmother's knees. Now sit where the wind can't get at you, and I'll tell you about the bird that kept the keep standing after the men had gone from it.

Keep reading

Every spring for forty years a swallow came up the valley from the sea and found the hole above the postern gate, where the masons had left a stone out. Nobody owned it. Lord Ashby had gone to the wars and not come back, his lady had gone to the convent at Holm, and the only people left were old Tam Pryce, who kept the gate, and his daughter Nell, who could read, which was thought a sin in that valley then.

Nell wrote her letters on scraps of sailcloth and tied them to the swallow's leg with red thread. Where do you think they went? Out over the marsh, past the salt pans, all the way to the harbour at Mallow, where a ship's boy would pluck them from the rigging and carry them to a man who had promised to come back for her. Seven springs she wrote, and the bird never once came late.

On the eighth spring the nest was empty and the letters stopped, so Tam walked down to the harbour himself. He found the sailor in a tavern by the quay, and the man took a tin from under his bunk and tipped it out on the table. Every scrap was there, folded flat and smoothed by his thumb. He had been out past the headland for years, following the birds south and back, and he had never once thought to read the threads.

So when you see one dip past the gatehouse this summer, you say good morning to it. It's carrying more than you think.