Traditional style tattoo of two blue and orange swallows with blue forget-me-not flowers, placed on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows and forget-me-nots on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two swallows in flight, one above the other, with forked blue wings and orange-red throats and breasts. Five-petalled blue forget-me-not flowers with yellow centres and small buds frame the birds on a curved stem, with scattered dots filling the gaps. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give it a classic, graphic finish on the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Swallow Bird Forget-me-not Flower Blue flower Bud

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your boots off the hearth stone, Marjorie's cat has claimed it. Now, the edge of Hollin Wood starts where the last cottage of Parrow's End gives up its washing line, and that's where the two swallows lived, in the eaves of the old fulling mill. They quarrelled every spring over mud for the nest. The blue-backed one, Ned's mother used to say, had a temper like a wet match, and the other one, the hen with the rust-red throat, never once let him have the last word.

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One autumn the mill race ran low and the mud went hard, and the pair of them had to fly the long way round to the water meadows past the Wend. There, on the bank, the forget-me-nots had come up thick as a wedding crowd. Those little blue stars with yellow eyes were known in the village as don't-forget-me flowers, and folk would pick a sprig for a sweetheart and tuck it in a Bible. The cock swallow dropped low over the stream and came up with a bud crosswise in his beak. He had no more sense than to fly with it, so he gave the hen half of it, and she gave him back a dot of mud she'd been carrying all summer, and that was the beginning of their peace.

They went south that winter, as swallows do, and no one in Parrow's End expected them back. But in spring the mill eaves were full of chattering, and the flowers came up along the Wend in a curling stem, every petal in place. I have a theory about that, which I won't bore you with.

So when you see them dip over the water in May, don't wave your arms about. They're only checking the bank, and making sure nobody's gone and forgotten.