Colour traditional-style swallow tattoo with green, pink and teal wings and an orange belly, placed on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on the top of a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed on the top of a foot, with its wings reaching towards the toes. The wings are filled with green, pink and teal and decorated with black filigree scrollwork, while the body is outlined in bold black with an orange belly and ornamental black detailing. The photograph is taken from above against a metal diamond-plate surface, with the toenails painted teal.

Traditional Other Swallow Bird Foot Wing Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to the Kittering wharf the same week the tide turned sour, and Old Hetty Marr swore they were carrying the news of her son's ship in their beaks. She sat on an upturned crate with a tin of tar and a bent nail, scratching lines into the boards of the ferry shed while the birds dipped under the eaves. Nobody on the quay believed her, but when the Cormorant limped in on the Thursday with her foremast gone, Hetty was already counting out the coins for the ferryman.

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Her son Dan came up the gangway with a wrapped parcel under one arm and a face the colour of wet rope. Inside the parcel was a scrap of sailcloth, stiff with salt, and a swallow cut from a brass shim, its wings worked over with tiny curling scrolls he had filed by lamplight through three gales. He said a mate had made it for him in Lisbon and it was meant for the bow, to bring the ship home. Hetty turned it over in her fingers and said the bow was for the living and the foot was for the walking, and she pressed it into his boot heel before he could argue.

That was the last anyone saw of the swallow for thirty years. Dan went back to sea and never once wore a boot without checking the heel first. The ferry shed fell down in the winter of the big flood, and the boards with Hetty's lines went under the mud. Still, on a late summer evening, the swallows come low over the water where the old wharf stood, and a fisherman's grandchild swears she has seen a bird with two green wings and a belly like a setting sun, flying just ahead of a bare foot on the mudflats.