Two forearms crossed together, each with matching black script reading I will always stand by your side and a small swallow on the forearm.

Matching script quote and swallow tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are crossed, each showing an identical black script quote reading I will always stand by your side, with a small outlined swallow placed beside the text. The lettering and bird are drawn in fine, consistent black linework with no shading or colour. The text runs diagonally on the upper arm and is stacked over three lines on the lower arm, with a pink sock visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Swallow Bird Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Corinna Vale believed Ada Pruett would sit still long enough for ink, so when she came up the gangway at Tilbury with a swallow drawn on her wrist in biro, the cook laid a bet on the spot. Her brother Sol had been on the coaster three winters, and the two of them had a habit of writing on each other's arms in the watch when the lamps were low, one line apiece, the same line, until the words wore off in the wash.

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The sailing master's rule was simple. A swallow on a man meant he had put a thousand sea miles behind him, and nobody with a swallow would be left in a harbour by his mates. Ada had no swallows of her own. She had the cook's pencil and a grievance about the bosun, and she said she would sooner lose her arm than let Sol go over the rail without something to remember them by.

So she sat him on an upturned bucket in the engine room, where the heat made the paint sweat, and pressed a fountain pen into his forearm and wrote the old promise out in her cramped hand, every word running downhill. When she was done she drew the bird beside it, badly, its tail forked like a pair of scissors. Sol studied it for a long time, then rolled his sleeve down over the ink.

The Corinna Vale came into Rotterdam in a gale the following spring. Ada went over the side for a dropped line and did not come up. Sol kept his cuff buttoned all the way home, and when the cook asked him why, he only tugged the sleeve and said the bird had somewhere to be.