Black ink drawing of a swallow above a speech-bubble shape containing the handwritten quote about desire and fire, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Swallow and quote design on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn swallow in flight sits above an outlined bubble shape holding the block capitals of a quote about desire and fire. The linework is bold and sketchy, with shaded areas on the bird's wings and some smudged grey tones on the paper behind the text. The design is in black and grey, centred in the frame on a pale background.

Lettering Swallow Quote Speech bubble Text Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Gull Terrace the same week every year, and Mr Quaile always said it was the house they liked, not the sea. He took the back room on the third floor in April with a paint box, a roll of brown paper and a cough he blamed on the salt. By June he had sold three sign-boards to the pier kiosks and was drawing every spare minute at the scullery table, where my bread knife was never once returned to the drawer.

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I found the drawing in August, weighted under the sugar bowl. A swallow dived over a bubble of words, the letters blocky and heavy as the gravel on the drive. I read it twice, standing there with the kettle going, and thought it a fine thing to say to a woman who had kept a boarding house for nineteen years and never once been asked what she wanted. He had written it out for me, I was sure of it, though he never said as much.

When the rain came in September he took to sitting by the range in the kitchen, which I allowed because the back room was damp as a church. 'I've had my fill of cold,' he said. 'I hold with the fire.' I told him he sounded like a poem. He said it was a poem, somebody else's, and then he laughed until he had to hold on to the table.

He left before the swallows did. The room was clean, the bed made tight, and under the sugar bowl there was a second sheet, the bird folded above a bubble with nothing inside it at all. I pinned it above the range. Each morning I riddle the grate and watch the bird catch the light, and I keep the kettle warm for the swallows, though they have gone south and I do not expect them back before spring.