Four birds in flight and script quote on foot
Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo
Four solid black bird silhouettes fly in a row above a line of fine, cursive script that reads life is a beautiful struggle. The lettering uses thin, connected strokes, while the birds are filled in with solid black ink. The tattoo is shown in black ink on skin against a sandy background, with the wording curving slightly across the foot.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Every spring the geese came over the mill at Haddon Fold, and every spring old Ada Quarles stood at the bottom of her garden with a bucket of windfall apples and counted them. Four, she would say, and then eight, and sometimes a stray one trailing behind like a boy late for school. Her husband had told her the count was no use to anyone. She told him the count was for the geese, so they would know someone was watching.
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The year the wall came down between the orchard and the lane, a surveyor's boy came to measure it. He was sixteen and sunburnt and wanted his tea. Ada gave him a cup and a heel of bread and asked him what the birds were doing up there. He said they were going south, the way birds did, and she said no, they were going where the wind was, which was a different thing entirely. He laughed at her. She let him.
He came back the next autumn, after his mother had died and the house had been sold, and found Ada sitting on the wall with her boots off and her feet in the long grass. Four birds crossed over, low and dark against the sky. She pointed at them with her chin. Life is a beautiful struggle, she said, and then she sent him home with a sack of apples and no explanation, which was how he understood that she had been waiting all along for someone to hear it.
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