Traditional-style swallow outline in white ink on the wrist, shown as pale raised lines against reddened skin.

Swallow outline in white ink on a wrist

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is outlined in white ink on the inner wrist, with its wings swept upward and its forked tail below. The line work is a single even contour with no shading or fill, and the skin around it looks reddened. The plain grey background fills the frame behind the wrist.

Traditional Other Swallow Bird Wing Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun of the Mary Ellen Rook never explained the bird on his wrist, only that the ink had been the cheapest thing in Gravesend that summer and that a swallow was meant to bring you home. He told Tomasz this on the crossing from Rotterdam, the new deckhand still green enough to be sick over the rail, while the lamp swung above the chart table and the Channel slapped the hull like a drunk knocking on a door.

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Harry Quill had sworn by swallows. He reckoned they steered by the same stars a man did and never forgot the eaves they were reared under. When the Sheila Brae went onto the Dungeness shingle in fog, Harry was the last one off, and the bosun watched him go over the side with a swallow inked in blue on his forearm. The bosun had his own done the week after the funeral, a single white outline, because the parlour had nothing else that week and he could not bear the colour of the sea in it.

Tomasz asked whether it had worked, whether the bird had brought him home. The bosun held his wrist up under the lamp so the line caught the light, pale as a wake on dark water. 'Every spring I get a letter from Harry's cousin at the boatyard,' he said. 'There's a pair of swallows nesting in the loft over the sail racks. Same pair, three years running.'

At first light the Rook came round the harbour wall and two birds dipped low over the mooring lines, wings stiff, forked tails snapping. The bosun lifted one hand from the wheel and turned his wrist towards them, and for once he did not look away from the water.