Black outline swallow tattoo in fine line style on the inner wrist and forearm of a pale-skinned person against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow outline on an inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline of a swallow in flight sits on the inner wrist, with its wings raised and its forked tail pointing upward. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill inside the outline. The pale skin and dark background give the simple monochrome design strong contrast and keep the composition focused on the wrist.

Fine line Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird

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 swallow struck the lamp room glass twice before Edith could get the sash up, and by the time she had it open the bird was lying on the iron grating with its wings folded like a pair of wet gloves. She knelt, careful of the salt crust on the rail, and lifted it. It weighed nothing, and its forked tail caught on her cuff.

Keep reading

Her father had kept the Scarrow light for thirty-one years and had never let a bird die in his lamp room without a word said over it. He called swallows the sailors' birds, because they came back to the same eaves every spring, whatever the weather had done to the ships. 'They don't get lost,' he used to say. 'They just take the long road home.'

The bird stirred in her palm. She carried it down the spiral stairs, counting the hundred and twelve iron steps out of habit, and set it on the kitchen sill beside the nest. The female was already there, chittering at the glass, and when the wounded one lifted its head the pair of them went quiet, as though they had been waiting for the storm to finish with them.

Edith wrote to the lifeboat station that night, the way her father used to log the weather. Wind south-west, force six. One swallow returned, injured, mended. Then she crossed out mended and wrote kept, because the bird had not yet flown, and she was not yet sure it would.