Black and white photo of a small swallow silhouette above the words 'this too shall pass' in fine script tattooed on the inner forearm.

Bird and script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid silhouette of a swallow sits at the left of a single line of thin, cursive script reading 'this too shall pass'. The linework is fine and even in black ink, with the lettering running along the inner forearm towards the wrist. The black and white photo is taken close up, with a hand resting over the lower part of the arm on a page of printed text.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Swallow Bird Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ysolde kept the toll-house at Carrow Gap for forty winters, and every spring she counted the swallows coming back over the ridge before she lifted the bar for anyone on the road. She counted them aloud, the way her mother had, because a thing that was counted was less likely to go missing.

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One March a merchant named Tobiah Penrose came up from the valley leading two mules with empty panniers. The river had taken his warehouse and the chest his wife brought as a dowry, and he wanted to know whether the old woman had a charm against feeling any of it. She said she had no charm, only the saying her mother had cut into the lintel above the door. He read it aloud, this too shall pass, and laughed without any warmth. "That is what people say when their barns are already burned," he said.

She gave him the loft above the stable and a bowl of broth. Before dawn he was at the gate, watching the first swallows stitch the air over the gap, dipping under the eaves where last year's mud nests still clung to the stone. Ysolde came out with her shawl and stood beside him. A swallow does not wait out the winter in one place, she said. It crosses the high passes in the dark, loses a third of its flock to the cold, and comes back to the same wall to rebuild what the weather knocked down. Nothing about the crossing is easy. The bird simply does not argue with the mountain.

Tobiah did not thank her. He paid the toll in coins he could not spare and rode down with the mules. The next March a carter brought a sack of salt up to the gap with a folded note inside, asking for a room again, and a sketch of two swallows drawn on the back of a bill of lading. Ysolde pinned the drawing beside her mother's words and counted the birds before she raised the bar.