A flash sheet of ten swallows in fine black linework with soft grey-blue wash, shown in different flying poses on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows in flight flash sheet

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet showing ten swallows in varied flying poses, arranged across the page with open wings and forked tails. The fine black linework is shaded with a soft grey-blue wash on the bodies and wings. The cream background and even spacing make each bird easy to see separately.

Fine line Swallow Bird Flight Flash sheet

Find an artist for this

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

The swallows came back to the cloister the week after Lady Day, as they always did, and by the time I climbed to the bell loft they had already claimed the beams above the lavabo. Brother Osric had the lime pot ready. He was a practical man, and the abbot had asked him to seal the eaves before the droppings ruined the scriptorium ledgers.

Keep reading

I asked him to wait one day. I said I would count them first. He laughed and said a lay brother with a stub of charcoal and no Latin had no business counting anything, but he sat on the step while I climbed with a ledger tucked under my habit. Ten birds, I wrote, though there were eleven at the top of the sky, and I could not fit the eleventh on the page. They dipped and swung over the wall, their forked tails opening and closing like the blades of a pair of shears.

The next morning I drew them. Not in the ledger, which was not mine, but on the back of a flour sack in the bakehouse, shading the bodies with ash rubbed into a little water so the grey sat soft as dusk. The fine lines of their wings I made with the point of a nail. When I held the sack to the light the birds looked as though they had only paused on their way to somewhere that mattered more than the abbot's eaves.

Osric studied the sack for a long time. Then he set down the lime, carried the ladder back to the store, and said that a building ought to keep something in it that did not belong to the rule. In June the swallows nested above the lavabo still. The ledgers are blotted in places, and I have never told the abbot which blots are mine.