Two swallow tattoos on a wrist and forearm, one in coloured ink with red throat and brown wings, the other a solid black silhouette.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows on wrists

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two swallow tattoos sit on the inner wrist and forearm of two different arms, shown against a dark background. The swallow on the upper arm has detailed feather shading in tan, brown, grey and a red throat, while the lower one is a flat black silhouette with no shading. The warm skin tones and dark backdrop give the composition a moody, close-up feel.

Forearm Swallow Bird Wing Flight

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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 yourself down by the oven door, where the bricks still hold the night's heat, and I'll tell you about the swallows of Mill Lane. You won't believe me, but then nobody believed Tomasz Garrow when he climbed the back stairs at four in the morning with flour to his elbows and a nest of straw tucked in his cap.

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There were two of them that spring, nesting in the gutter above the proving room. The first was a dark little thing, all ink and no colour, that came back every year to the same beam. The second was the one with the russet breast and a throat like a cut cherry, and she arrived late, after a storm had flattened the reeds on the river. Old Mrs Pell swore they were sisters who had quarrelled over a loaf in some other life. I never asked which of them had been owed the bread.

Then the dark one came down in the rain with a broken wing, and the red-throated one began her work. Every morning before the shutters went up she flew the length of the lane to the bins behind the market, and every morning she came back with a crust in her beak. She dropped it beside the dark one, who sat with his wing folded like a letter nobody had yet opened.

When the wing mended, the pair went over the rooftops together before the bells, two small shapes against the grey, and from the street below you could not tell one from the other. That is the trick of it, my love. Flight makes everybody look the same. Now pass me that knife and cut yourself the heel, it's the best of the loaf.