Black and white photo of a man in a suit and polka dot tie, with a traditional swallow and leaf tattoo on his neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph cropped to show a man's neck, beard and upper chest, wearing a pinstriped suit, white shirt and dotted tie. A traditional-style swallow with bold outlines and solid shading sits on the side of the neck, with pointed leaves and a small banner below it. The soft monochrome lighting and shallow focus keep attention on the tattoo against the dark background.

Traditional Neck Swallow Leaves Banner Bird

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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

The swallow came back to Wapping in the second week of November, the same week the Mary Kell was towed in with her foremast gone and two men missing off the Dogger Bank. Nobody on the quay could say where it had roosted. I found it at closing time on the iron rail above the chandlery door, black against the gaslight, turning its head to look at the ledger under my arm as if it had read every debt written inside.

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Old Ezra Pell had walked into the shop each spring for eleven years to buy a single brass hook and never once paid for more than the hook. He told me a swallow was pricked for every five thousand miles a sailor put behind him, and the scroll beneath was for the names you carried home. He had two birds inked at his throat, a pair of pointed leaves, and a banner with a name he would never say aloud. Ezra had not been seen since the Mary Kell sailed, and his account stood open, unpaid.

I carried the ledger to the cold stove and opened it at his page. The swallow dropped from the rail, skimmed the lamp, and settled on the paper with a sound like a furled sail. Where its feet touched the ink, a second bird spread out in black, bold and certain, and beside it, in a hand I did not recognise, a name I had never heard was written and then crossed through. I shut the book. Outside the tide was turning, and the bell at St John's rang once for each of the two men on the Dogger Bank, and then, very faintly, a third.