Black ink tattoo of three swallows flying over a curving music staff with two notes, on the side of a torso below a purple top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows on a music staff

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black swallows fly above a wavy five-line music staff, which curves across the skin and ends in a large filled note at each side. The linework is solid black with soft grey shading on the birds and notes, and the lines are clean and even. The image is in black and grey only, with the tattoo centred on bare skin beneath a purple top.

Other Music note Music staff Swallow Bird

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

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

The swallows came aboard again off Finisterre, six of them, worn out and sitting along the foremast like notes somebody had dropped. Cook says it means we are near land, and Cook says a lot of things once the rum runs low. I fed them crumbs from the biscuit tin and they did not thank me, which is the sort of manners I expect from birds and most of the crew.

Your letter reached me at Lisbon, the one about Mr Harker's choir and the new hymn you said I would hate. I hum it at the stove now. The pot knows the tune better than I do. Last night I scratched five lines into the flour bin lid with a skewer, bowed like the rigging in a swell, and set the swallows on them where you would have put them. Ollie from the afterdeck says it looks like a bill of lading for a song. I told him it was a map of the way home.

Here is the thing I have not told Mother. Aaron, the cook's mate, fell from the topgallant in the Bay, and we put him over with a hymn nobody could sing properly. I had the galley fire banked and the kettle on and nothing to do with my hands, so I kept counting the beats in my head, and the swallows kept turning over the water as if they were waiting for a cue.

They will be ashore before I am, I reckon, and they will find the way without anyone reading it to them. I am writing the last bar on the lid now, two big black notes at either end, heavy as ballast, so the whole thing has somewhere to land. Keep the kettle warm. I will be home for the Whitsun choir, and I will sing the bass line, badly, and you can tell me I have not changed.

Your loving brother, Tom