Black ink swallow tattoo with ornamental filling on the upper shoulder and collarbone area, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed on the upper shoulder near the collarbone, facing right with its wings raised. The bird is outlined in black with its wings and body filled with ornamental floral and paisley-like patterns, and the lines are solid and clean. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against pale skin and a white top in a close, cropped composition.

Traditional Shoulder Swallow Bird Floral Paisley Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada found the swallow in the feed store behind the bales, a bird no bigger than a fist, one wing folded wrong. Her uncle Tom had always said swallows were gone by September. Snow had already come down over the top field twice that week, and the lambing shed smelled of iodine and wet straw.

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She wrapped it in her grandmother's blue cardigan and carried it across the yard inside her coat. The kitchen range was the only warm room in the house. Tom watched from the doorway with his arms folded, saying nothing about the price of paraffin, then pulled a chair up to the table and slid the tin of sugar water across without being asked.

By morning the bird had lifted its head. Its back was dark as ink, and when the low sun came through the window the pale patterns on its wings looked like frost ferns, or the crochet lace her grandmother used to sew onto every cuff in the house. Ada had always thought swallows were plain birds. Tom said they only looked plain from a distance.

On the third day she opened the back door onto the white field. The swallow sat on her knuckle, tested its wings twice, then went straight up over the barn roof, turning once against the grey sky before it was gone south. Tom stood there a long while with his hands in his pockets. "Well," he said at last. "Someone will have to tell them the roads are bad."