Black and grey photo of a woman's bare back with a small swallow tattoo near the neck and fine script across the lower back.

Swallow and script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind with her hair tied up, her bare back fully visible. A small solid black swallow sits near the top of her spine, and thin cursive script runs down the lower back, too small to read clearly. The monochrome photograph uses soft directional lighting against a plain pale wall.

Fine line Back Swallow Bird Script Quote Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The swallows came back to the cart shed on Tuesday, two of them, fussing at the rafter where the old nest was, and I stood in the yard with the bucket going cold in my hand and watched them as if they owed us money. Father would have said they were the same pair. He said that about everything that came home: the same ones, the same bells, the same rain coming off the Caddon ridge.

You asked in your last letter whether the woods still run right up to the back of the churchyard. They do. Mrs Pryce's boy went in after the strayed heifer on Saturday and came out four hours later saying the path had moved, which is what he always says, and nobody believed him until Mr Hale found the stile on the wrong side of the brook. I told him to go back in with a heel of bread and leave a trail of crumbs. He laughed, but he took the bread.

The thing I keep meaning to tell you is that I have started going into the wood myself, mornings, before the milk. Not far. Only to the oak with the split trunk, where you and I carved our initials until Father made us cover them with pitch. Somebody has been leaving things there. A blue button. A folded page torn from a seed catalogue with a bird drawn on it in pencil, badly, but a swallow for certain.

I have not decided yet whether to answer it. Come home at Easter if you can, and bring your good boots. The birds will be back on the wire by then, waiting to see whether we do the same.

Your loving sister, Nell