Realistic colour tattoo of two swallows in flight across the outer thigh, with blue heads and backs and shaded brown wings.

Two swallows in flight on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two swallows are shown in flight, one above the other, with the upper bird's wings spread and its tail forked. The feathers and heads are rendered with fine detail and smooth shading, giving a lifelike, three-dimensional effect. Blue ink dominates the birds' heads and backs, with brown and grey tones on the wings and pale underparts against the skin.

Realism Thigh Swallow Bird Flight Feather

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

Sit nearer the fire, bach, the swallows won't wait for us. Every spring they came up the Rhondda in the same week the colliery whistle went quiet for Easter, and they made straight for the winding house at Glynfach, because that building was warm from the boilers and open at both ends like a chapel nobody had thought to lock.

Keep reading

There were two of them the year Idris Morgan was on the last shift of number three shaft. The cage was slow that morning, the wire ropes groaning over the big wheel, and he stood in the lamp room with his tin in his hand, watching a pair of swallows stitch mud to the rafters above the drum. The grey one kept diving down to the sill for straw, and the blue-backed one kept perching on the wire and chattering at him as if he owed it money.

Idris walked out of that lamp room in the evening with his tin under his arm and the birds still arguing above him. The pit was shut for good the week after, and the lads stood at the gate with nothing to do and nowhere to put their hands. That was the morning I remember. The grey swallow went up past the headgear, higher than anything else in the valley, and the blue one followed, tucked just beneath it, so that from the slag heap the two of them looked like one line drawn across the sky.

My mother said it was the luck of the place. I say it was only a pair of birds who knew the way out of a hole before any of us did.