Fine line tattoo of six small birds in flight above the script words Life goes on... on a woman's upper back near the shoulder.

Birds in flight and script on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's upper back and shoulder showing six small bird silhouettes in flight, arranged in a loose diagonal. Below them, the cursive script words Life goes on... run across the skin. The thin, even linework is dark blue-black against pale skin, with a wooden fence and dark top in the background.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Bird Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts left Marrowby on the second Tuesday of August, the same as they always had, and I stood on the back step of Seaview with a tea towel over my shoulder and counted them over the chimney pots. Six, then seven, then the small one that always lagged behind and came wheeling over the harbour wall as if it had left something on the sand.

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Mr Vance had the front room on the top floor for eleven weeks. He drew maps of the coast for a publisher in London, sharp little pencil lines of cliffs and groynes, and he never once came down to breakfast before the gulls were fighting over the bins. He paid in coins, because he said paper money made him nervous. On the Friday he carried his case down the stairs with his hat already on, and I thought that was that.

Only when I went up to strip the bed did I find the note, folded under the teapot on the dresser where he had left it for me. It was written in the same careful hand as his maps. Mrs Carrow, the sash in the top room sticks, but do leave it open a crack. The birds pass the roofline around six and I should hate to miss them. Life goes on, and so do the swifts.

I did not know what to make of that, so I did as he asked. I went up at six the next evening with the kettle still warm in my hand and lifted the sash until it gave. Six dark shapes came over the slates, then a seventh, and for a while the room was full of the sound of their wings. I stood there until the light went off the harbour. Then I went down and wrote the date in the book, and under it I put the day's takings, which were, for once, nothing to complain about.