Black ink swallow in a traditional style flying above a rayed sun and wavy lines, tattooed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow over sun and waves on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black outline swallow with filled wing shapes flies above a circular sun with spiked rays. Three wavy lines sit beneath the sun, forming the base of the composition. The tattoo is shown in black ink on pale skin, with simple, bold linework and no shading beyond the solid fills.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Sun Wave Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old keeper of Caddon Head had a rule that nobody lit a fire in the ruin after dark, for the swallows would not forgive it. He said this to every child who climbed the broken wall, and every child laughed, and every child went up the stair anyway, because the view from the top took the breath out of you.

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One autumn a boy called Tam Hewett, whose father mended nets in the cove below, carried a tinder box up the stair to light a fire for his sister's birthday. The wind came off the sea and the flame would not hold. A swallow dropped out of the empty arch, low over the water, and caught the spark in its wings. It flew straight up past the sun that was sinking red behind the cliffs, and the light went with it, and the sea below turned the colour of pewter.

Tam did not light another fire. He went down to the harbour and told the keeper what he had seen, and the keeper nodded as if he had expected it. "She carries the sun back out to sea each night," he said, "and every night she is late, the waves come a little higher up the castle." Tam asked how he knew. The keeper pointed at the waterline, where the old stones were green with weed, and said it had been a long time since the sea came so close.

That winter Tam climbed the stair every evening with bread crusts in his pockets. He never saw the bird catch the sun. He only saw, each dusk, a swallow dip low over the waves, and each morning the tide stood a finger's width lower on the stones.