Three solid black silhouette swallows in flight on a white background, shown as a tattoo design sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three swallows in flight silhouette

Black and grey · Flash

Three swallows are shown in flight at different angles, each rendered as a solid black silhouette with forked tails and pointed wing tips. The edges are smooth and the forms have no interior linework, shading or detail. The birds are arranged down a tall white background, with the largest at the top and the smallest at the bottom.

Swallow Bird Silhouette Flight

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

They came back to Porthkerris the week the nets went out, three swallows over the quay, the biggest first, then the middle one, then the little one that always lagged behind. Old Jenna Pascoe counted them from the harbour wall every spring, the way her mother had, and said that as long as three came home, the boats would too.

Keep reading

The spring her son Tomas sailed for the far grounds, only two came. He had stood on the quay with his oilskin over his arm and watched the gap in the sky where the smallest should have been. Jenna did not weep. She went down to the harbour master and said the wind had turned, and that the little one was a stubborn thing that would fly the long way round rather than come in on a bad sea.

Days passed. Then on a grey morning the smallest bird dropped out of the cloud above the breakwater, wings held stiff, and skimmed past the mast of the Mary Ellen to land on the coiled rope by her door. Tomas was not with it. Only a scrap of tarred canvas was tied to its leg, and on it, in pencil, a single word in a hand she knew.

She untied it and tucked the bird under her shawl, and when the boats came in on the evening tide she was already at the water's edge, counting. Two, she said, to nobody. Then a third mast rounded the point, and the little one, somewhere above it, had already begun to sing.