Small black swallow tattoo in a traditional style on the upper arm of a person wearing a patterned top and denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small swallow in flight is tattooed on the upper arm, shown in black ink with simple outlines and light grey shading on the wings. The photograph is a casual close crop of the torso and arm, with a patterned top bearing a white logo and a white tote bag in the frame. The tattoo is the only element in the composition that is inked, and its colour is entirely black and grey.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hob Teale kept his ink in a Bovril tin under the bunk, and he swore it was the same black the Tyne ferrymen used for their fares. Dessie Rourke sat on the hatch cover with his sleeve rolled to the shoulder while gulls quarrelled over the coal dust on the quay at Blyth. 'One swallow's five thousand miles,' Hob said, bent over him with the needle clamped in a cork. 'Do the sum before you commit yourself, lad. Rotterdam and back is a fair few birds.'

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The Margaret Lowe had been out three weeks when the weather came down off Flamborough like a dropped sack. Dessie was at the wheel when a swallow hit the wheelhouse window, stunned and soaking, and the cook carried it below in a tea towel. It sat on the rail next morning, fat with crumbs, too tired to be frightened. Dessie swore it looked back at him before it went, not towards the coast but out over the grey water, and that the wind had been from the south all night, which no swallow would fly into in October.

When the Margaret Lowe docked, Dessie went straight to Hob's back room above the chandlers and held out his arm. Hob pulled the lamp closer, wiped the skin with methylated spirit and worked the black along the wing lines again, slow and careful. Grey shading went in last, soft as smoke over the river. 'There,' Hob said. 'That one's paid for.' Dessie looked at the bird in the lamplight, its wings swept back as if it had just cleared the headland, and found he no longer cared about the sum. He had seen one bird come home, and that was enough to be going on with.