Black and grey tattoo of two swallows in flight on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a beaded bracelet below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in flight on the wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two swallows fly in opposite directions across the inner forearm, one angled up to the left and the other to the right. The birds are drawn with bold outlines and soft grey shading on the bodies and wings, with fine feather detail. The photo is taken close up at an angle, with a beaded chain bracelet and a dark sleeve at the lower edge of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Swallow Bird Wing

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

Past the last well at Sallow Crossing, where the road forgot it had ever been meant for cars, a water carter called Idris Moan kept two swallows in a biscuit tin bolted behind his cab. He had found them as bare chicks in the rafters of the wellhouse and fed them soaked dates from his own pocket until their feathers came through blue-black and sharp. When the first rains greened the wadi, he opened the tin and let them go, and they went like thrown stones, one east toward the salt pans and one west toward the hills.

Keep reading

People on the road said a swallow always comes back to the eave it was reared under, so the birds would surely return to him. Idris did not believe such things. He believed in diesel, the thirty-kilometre run to the pumps, and the price of a drum. Still, each evening he parked at the cairn and looked up, and each evening only one of them came down, perching on the mirror bracket with its tail flicking as if it had news and no one to tell.

Then one dusk in the hot month, a boy herding goats along the shoulder called out that two birds were fighting over his cap. Idris pulled over. Both swallows came down onto the dashboard at once, wings half open, and sat there while the sun went red behind the hills. The east bird had been flying out to find shade, and the west bird had been flying out to find water, and the road between them was only the distance they had agreed to cross.

He drove the last forty kilometres with the window down and the birds riding the wind at his shoulder, one on each side, going the same way for once.