Black ink line drawing of a swallow, two roses, a crown and beaded chains with leaves and dotwork, drawn on pale tracing paper as a botanical tattoo design.

Swallow, roses and crown design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing on pale paper shows a swallow in flight beside two large open roses, with leaves, a crown at the top and strings of beads looping around the composition. The linework is clean and even, with hatched shading on the leaves and petals and stippled dots scattered near the bird. The sheet is entirely monochrome, and the design is arranged to fill a tall, roughly rectangular area.

Botanical Dotwork Neo-trad Swallow Rose Crown Bead Leaves Flower Dot

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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

Now sit still, because the swallow won't come back to a garden where people fidget. This was your grandfather's garden, behind the chapel at Ashcombe, and the wall was so old the mortar had gone to sugar. Every spring the swallow came in over the lych gate, low and quick, the way they do when they've been a long way and are tired of it.

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Between the two big roses sat a stone crown on the gatepost, the one the squire's wife had pulled down in the war and nobody had troubled to put back. Old Mrs Pascoe kept her beads on a nail by the shed, a string of jet she said had been her mother's, and every evening she counted them round the roses, one bead for each bloom she meant to save from the frost. The swallow nested under that crown. She always said it was the only royal thing in the parish that ever paid its rent.

The year the frost came early, she counted and counted and came up one bead short. Forty-one blooms and forty beads. She stood there in her apron until the light went, and the swallow flew round and round the roses, dipping, as if it were counting too. In the morning there was a single white rose in the far bed, open, with frost on every petal but its middle. Nobody ever planted it. Nobody ever dug it up either.

So when the swallow comes over the gate now, you tip your hat to it. That's manners. And if you ever find a bead in the grass by the wall, you give it back to the bird, who knows what it's for.