Black cursive lettering reading Stay Strong with small blue watercolour swallows flying across it on a plain grey background.

Stay Strong script with blue swallows

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

The design shows the words Stay Strong in black flowing script with long looped tails on the S and the final g. Several small blue watercolour swallows fly in two loose trails, one above and one below the lettering. The subject is isolated on a pale grey background with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Stay strong Script Lettering Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the stove is only warm on this side. No, don't look at the tent poles, they have held up nothing but rain since the autumn your mother was born. Tonight I'll tell you about the Mazzetti flyers and the swallows that followed them south.

Keep reading

Old Ada Mazzetti flew the high bar for thirty-one seasons, and every spring, when the big top went up on the common at Harrowgate, the swallows came back to nest in the rigging. They were blue as ink on wet paper, and she swore they knew the road better than any bill poster. When the circus was sold off piece by piece, the elephants to a farm in Wales and the calliope to a man in Leeds, Ada refused to leave. She sat on the empty ring with a tin of lamp oil and a brush, and she painted two words across the canvas flap of the last wagon, Stay Strong, in letters with tails that curled like smoke.

The swallows never left her. Every dusk they came in two long trails, one above the wagon and one below, and they dipped through the lettering as if reading it aloud. The village thought she had gone soft in the head. Perhaps she had. But the rain stopped the week the paint dried, and a boy from the lane came with a ladder and asked if she would teach him to fly.

Ada never got the ring working again. She taught him to hang by his knees from the wagon beam instead, and to trust the hands that would catch him. That is the whole secret, my love, and no, the birds do not come back for it. Now go to bed before the stove goes cold.