Black and grey swallow tattoo with cloud-like patterned fills on the side of the ribs, with a coloured sleeve tattoo partly visible at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is shown in solid black outline, with its wings and body filled with ornamental black and grey cloud and scroll motifs. The shading uses smooth grey wash and fine line detail, with the wing tips extending sharply to the upper right. The bird sits on the side of the ribs, centred in a close crop, and a coloured tattoo on an arm appears at the left edge.

Traditional Japanese Ribs Swallow Bird Cloud Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways off the estuary since before dawn, and you have given up keeping the paper dry. At stall twelve on Hollis Lane, Dougie Penhallow is wrapping herring in yesterday's racing pages, and you set your carving on the counter between the vinegar jars. It is a swallow, mostly, cut from driftwood that washed up at Carrick Point last winter. You have filled its wings with the cloud and scroll pattern your grandmother used to press into candle wax, so the bird seems to be flying through a storm of its own making.

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"Looks like it's been caught in weather," Dougie says, wiping his thumbs on his apron. "Good. Weather's all we get round here." He offers two pounds, then three, and you shake your head, because the bird is not for sale, only for trade. He considers this with the seriousness of a man who has never once been asked for a barter. Then he takes a tin of peaches from the shelf behind him and sets it beside the swallow, and the rain drums on the awning so loudly that you have to lean in to hear him say the price is a tin and a promise to come back before the tide turns.

You agree, because promises cost less than driftwood. You walk out past the fish boxes with the tin under your arm, and the downpour rinses the chalk prices off the board until only the numbers for eggs remain legible. At the far end of the market a girl with a broom far too large for her is sweeping water off the cobbles, and every few strokes she stops to watch the gutters, where sparrows and the odd swallow shelter under the lip of the roofs.

By the time the stalls shut, the bird is gone from the counter, and in its place Dougie has left a square of herring wrapping folded into the shape of a cloud. You take it home and set it on the windowsill, where it goes soft at the corners and waits for the weather to clear.