Two small black and grey traditional swallow tattoos on the inner wrists of two people resting their hands on green grass.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two matching swallow tattoos on wrists

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small swallow designs sit on the inner wrists of two people whose hands rest together over long grass stems. Each bird is drawn in bold outlines with simple grey shading on the wings and body, and the swallows face in opposite directions. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the soft natural light and green grass fill the background.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Grass Wrist

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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 down, the both of you, and mind the wet on that step. You'll want to hear this from the top, because the top is where it starts, fourteen floors up on Calder House, where the wind comes round the corner like it owes somebody money.

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Lilian and Pearl Okafor-Bright were not sisters by blood. They were sisters by the back stairwell, which is a kind of blood round here. Every spring the swallows came back to the vent above the bins, and every spring Pearl stood on the bottom landing counting them in. "Two," she'd say. "Going out, coming home." Lilian said that was just birds doing what birds do. Pearl said that was exactly the point.

Then Pearl got the job on the boats out of Grimsby, and the week before she left they walked the back field, out past the fence where nobody cut the grass. Long stalks, seed heads like little green feathers. Lilian said she would not be sentimental about it, and then she sat down in the grass and cried into her own sleeve, and Pearl sat down beside her.

They went to a man on Mill Road who asked no questions. He held their wrists under his lamp and said, "Same bird, opposite ways?" One swallow turned left, one turned right, so that whichever way you looked, one of them was always heading home. Pearl sent a postcard every month for eleven years, and Lilian kept every one in a biscuit tin under the sink. Each spring she stood at the vent and counted two, and she never once counted only one.