Black and grey tattoo of two swallows, roses and a butterfly across a torso, in a traditional style on the ribs and stomach.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallows, roses and a butterfly on the torso

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A torso wearing a floral patterned bra shows two swallows with spread wings and a cluster of roses above, with a larger butterfly below on the stomach. The linework is bold and the wings and petals are shaded in black and grey. The image is a close crop with soft bedding and a dark knitted garment at the edges, and a hand with dark nails is visible at the lower right.

Traditional Botanical Ribs Swallow Bird Rose Flower Butterfly

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 aboard off the Scillies, two of them, and settled on the mainyard as though they had paid for the passage. Ned Parrish swore they were the pair that had followed the Marguerite out of Gravesend, and nobody on the watch was fool enough to argue with a man who had been seasick for eleven days running and still went up the ratlines before breakfast.

Keep reading

Old Hollis, the cook, kept a tin of roses on the galley step, grown from a cutting his sister had sent in a letter that smelt of vinegar. He watered them with the dregs of the tea and talked to them the way other men talked to dogs. When fog came down thick off the Azores and the lamp could not be seen from the bow, he carried the tin up to the wheelhouse and set it on the binnacle, saying the swallows would not leave a ship that had something green aboard.

A pale moth, or what Ned called a butterfly, came out of the fog that night and settled on the chart table, its wings folded like a page of a prayer book. The mate wanted it squashed. Ned would not allow it. By morning the fog had lifted, the swallows were gone, and the butterfly had gone with them, leaving a faint smudge of powder beside the Lizard on the chart.

Hollis never said he was glad. He only tipped the last of the tea over the roses and wiped the tin clean with his apron. Ned always said the swallows brought them home, but Hollis knew the roses had done the real steering, and the sea had never once been asked its opinion.