Black script reading Sisters by chance, Friends by choice, with three small swallow silhouettes, on the side of the ribs in fine line lettering.

Script quote with swallows on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close side view of a rib area showing a black script quote reading Sisters by chance and Friends by choice, set in two lines. Three small solid black swallow silhouettes sit to the left of the text, and a dark bra band is visible at the top of the frame. The ink is black on skin tone with clean, thin strokes and no shading, shown under warm indoor lighting.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Swallow Bird Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the boathouse key on a string round her neck the summer the matron sent Dilys down the lane with a carpet bag and a note pinned to her coat. The note said nothing about blood. It said only that the girl was ten, could gut a mackerel faster than any man on the quay, and would not answer to anyone who asked whose she was.

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The swallows came in April, as they always did, and built their mud cups under the lintel above the slipway. Dilys counted them every morning from the bottom rung of the ladder. Three that year, one with a torn tail. "Sisters by chance," Nell said, mostly to annoy her, and Dilys flung a wet rope at her head. "Friends by choice, then. Say it properly." Nell did, and they didn't speak for the rest of the afternoon.

In September the birds gathered on the telegraph wire and went south in one loose line, and Nell's aunt wrote to say there was work at the cannery in Penhallow. Nell packed without saying much. At the gate Dilys pushed a fistful of chalk into her coat pocket. "You'll want to mark the days off," she said. "I don't need to."

Nell came back the next April on the Tuesday carrier, boots in one hand. The slipway was quiet. Above the lintel two mud cups had been patched, and a third had been left bare with a limpet shell pressed into its rim. Dilys was sitting on the bottom rung with her knees up. When she saw Nell she didn't stand. She only tipped her head at the eaves, where three birds were squabbling over the same ledge.