Black flowing script reading Saudade with a small leaf sprig at the lower right, shown as a standalone lettering design on a white background.

Saudade script lettering with leaf

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A standalone lettering design showing the word Saudade in large, flowing black script with a looping capital S and a long swash on the final letter. A small sprig of two leaves sits beneath the end of the word at the lower right. The design is solid black on a plain white background, centred in a wide horizontal composition.

Lettering Script Leaves Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle has boiled twice since the bus pulled out, and I keep forgetting to lift it off. Your mother says I stand at the sink like a woman waiting for a train that has already gone. She is right, the nosy old thing. You were always the one who remembered the gas and the coal man and which tap dripped.

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The colliery whistle went at six this morning, the same long note it has given since before either of us was born. I stood in the yard and listened to the cage clanking down the shaft, and I counted the shifts on the calendar by the back door. Thirty-one left until the contract ends and you're on the Thursday bus with your boots tied to your kitbag. Your brother says the men in the Miners' Welfare have started a book on whether you'll come back with a tan. I told him you've never had one in your life.

The hedge behind the chapel is coming green, the hawthorn first, then the wild garlic down by the brook. I pressed a sprig of it inside the Bible on the windowsill, the way you used to press clover into my school books and swear it was for luck. It has gone the colour of weak tea already, and I can't yet tell whether that is the paper or me.

Mr Hale at chapel says the Portuguese have a word for this, a longing for someone who is still out there and not gone. I told him we have a word too, and it is usually swearing. Come home by the Thursday bus. I'll set the kettle on properly this time, and I'll let it boil dry only if you're late.