Colour neo-trad style swallow tattoo with blue and red wings patterned with a flag design, and Rebel Within script above it, on a person's upper back.

Swallow with Rebel Within script on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A swallow in mid-flight is tattooed across the upper back, with its body and wing shaded in blue, white and red, and a star-patterned flag design filling part of the wing. Loose feathers drift from the wing and tail, and black script reading Rebel Within sits above the bird. The outlines are bold and the colour is applied in smooth gradients against lightly freckled skin, with the photo taken from behind and centred on the design.

Neo-trad Lettering Back Swallow Bird Feather Flag Script Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pennant had been up on the Constance since before Nell was born, a long strip of cloth on the mast with its bars of red and blue and its crowd of white stars, and every spring the swallows came back and ignored it entirely. Uncle Ray said that was the sense of birds. They didn't care what you flew under as long as the mud was wet and the eaves were dry.

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The barge was going to a yard at Gainsborough in the morning. Ray had sold her to a couple from Leeds who wanted to turn her into a holiday let, and he had said nothing about the pennant, which Nell took to mean he didn't want to be asked. She stood on the towpath in the grey light with a knife from the galley, reaching up to work the cord free. Her hands were stiff with cold, and the cloth came away heavier than she expected, gritty with a year of soot.

A swallow dropped off the wire above her, low over the water, and swung sharply at the bank. Then another. They were building under the lip of the cabin roof again, carrying mud pellets from the shallows, and she realised the cloth had been hanging just above their nest the whole time, a loose thread of it trailing down that they had been picking at all week.

She didn't throw it in. She folded it small, pushed it into her coat pocket, and climbed back aboard to tell Ray the swallows had already moved in, so the house would have to come with them. He looked at the nest for a long time, then at her, and said the birds could keep the view.