Traditional style swallow tattoo with blue wings and a red breast on the upper chest, near the collarbone.

Swallow on the upper chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A blue swallow in flight, with a red breast and yellow-tinged wing edges, sits on bare skin near the collarbone. Bold black outlines and solid, flat fills give it the classic flash look. The tattoo is centred in the frame, with the shoulder and neck visible around it and a blurred room behind.

Traditional Chest Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of April the swallows had claimed the cracked lintel of the chandler's shed on Skerrin, and you were the only one on the quay who bothered to count them. Eleven, then twelve, then one low over the pier with a red thread in its beak. Old Tobias Lund said that was a bad sign for a boat not yet home. You told him it was nesting wool, and he spat.

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The Ellen Marr had been past the Stacks since Tuesday, her skipper your uncle's cousin, the man who taught you to splice rope. When the wind swung south-west you went down to the slipway with a flask of tea gone cold and a spare coil over your shoulder. The swallows dipped and wheeled above the grey water as if they had already decided the sea belonged to them.

She came in at dusk with her sail patched in sacking and only two of her four men aboard. Nobody said much. You handed up the line, and the mate, a boy you once beat at marbles, took the flask without looking at you. A swallow dropped from the rigging onto the bollard by your boot, tilted its head, and studied you as though you should already know.

You learned the rest in the chandler's back room over rum nobody wanted. That night you sat at the window until the lamp guttered. By morning there was a fresh rim of mud on the nest above the shed, and the birds were already quarrelling over it as if spring had never asked anyone's permission. You still count them every April. There are always fewer than you expect, and always enough to keep you on the wall.