Two stacked photos of inner forearms with fine-line script lettering and a small swallow silhouette tattoo in black ink.

Script quotes with swallows on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a two-panel composite showing two forearms, each with a line of fine script lettering and a small swallow silhouette. The top panel reads "Take these broken wings and learn to fly" with the bird beside the end of the text, and the bottom panel reads "Take these sunken eyes and learn to see" with the bird placed below the start of the line. The ink is dark and appears to be black or grey, set against zebra-print bedding.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Swallow Bird Wing Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at Halsey's boarding house in October with one suitcase and a tin of drawing pencils, and Mrs Ruddock hands you a key tied to a brass fish. The sea wind rattles the sash all night. By morning the telephone wire outside the kitchen is crowded with swallows, dozens of them, lined up like notes on a stave. They go south before breakfast. One stays behind, a young bird with a bent wing that hops along the yard and refuses the air.

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Mrs Ruddock says it belongs to nobody, so you feed it bread soaked in milk from a saucer on the back step. The lodgers complain about the fishy damp, and the retired schoolmaster in room four asks what you are always scratching at. You tell him it is the bird. He says a bird with a broken wing is a dreary subject and you should draw something with a bit of sunshine in it. You draw the bird anyway, every evening, trying to get the angle of that wing right, and each sketch looks less like a bird and more like a thing you have finally learned to look at.

In November a gale tears the sheets from the line and the bird is found under the boathouse, stiff and light as a dropped glove. You bury it in the dunes where the sea holly starts. When you come back, there is a note on your pillow from the schoolmaster. He has pinned your best drawing above the kitchen sink, where the light from the window falls on it each morning.

Mrs Ruddock sets a saucer of milk beneath the drawing anyway, for whatever comes next.