Black script lettering reading My brother, My best friend and Forever in my heart, with three swallows in flight, tattooed across the upper back.

Script quote and swallows on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of cursive script, reading My brother, My best friend above Forever in my heart, with three black swallow silhouettes flying below the text and a fourth swallow near the top right. The lettering and birds are rendered in solid black ink with smooth, bold edges and no visible shading. The photograph is taken close up on skin with the tattoo centred and the background softly out of focus.

Lettering Back Script Quote Swallow Bird Forever Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage came up at six with its iron clang, and you were already at the pithead gate with your dinner tin, because Owen had said he would wait and Owen never waited. The swallows were back under the winding-house eaves, dropping mud onto the coal dust, and he swore they had flown all the way from Africa just to spite the colliery.

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Owen was the one who knew which seam had gas in it, which overman drank, and how to make three pints last a Friday on a borrowed shilling. When the roof came down at Gelli Pit in the spring, he was on the far side of the fall with a lamp and a shovel. You were not. You were on the surface with a cup of tea going cold, reading names off the board, and you did not stop reading until his went up in chalk.

The inquest took a fortnight and the chapel took another. Your mother wanted the stone to say something holy, and you wanted it to say what he would have said, which was that you were soft. In the end it said only his name. It was his jacket you could not give away. In the inside pocket was a shift ticket folded into a square, and on the back, in his careful capitals that leaned like a fence in a gale, he had written: MEET ME AT THE WINDING HOUSE WHEN THE SWALLOWS GO.

So you went at the end of August. The shed doors stood open and the wire was crowded with birds, shuffling along it like men waiting for the bus. You counted them the way you counted men off the board. Three lifted at once and turned for the coast. The fourth stayed on the wire with one wing raised, looking at you, until you said his name out loud. Then it went too, low over the spoil heap, after the others.