Swallow tattoo design
Every tattoo image on this site is a generated illustration. None of it is work by this artist and none of it records a client result.
- Style
- Minimalist
- Suggested placement
- Wrist
- Suggested size
- Small, under 5 cm
The name goes into the enquiry for you. Say where it goes and how big, and the drawing comes back before anything is booked.
What it means
Sailors wore the swallow as proof of distance: one for five thousand nautical miles covered, and a swallow was said to mean land was near, because the birds do not fly far out to sea. In parts of Britain and Australia it later came to mark a prison sentence served.
Today it usually means neither, and whoever wears it picks the reading. It is one of the clearest cases of a symbol whose meaning moved three times in a century while the drawing stayed the same.
