Swallow tattoo behind the ear

Bess Morrow was nineteen the summer she took up with a boy from the lifeboat house who could not sing and would not stop trying. Her mother said he had the look of a man who'd drown in a rainwater butt. He went to sea anyway, as they all did, and before he went he paid old Tam Kerr a shilling to put a swallow on the back of Bess's neck, just below her hairline, where no collar would ever hide it. Tam worked out of a shed that smelled of linseed and tar. He never once got the wings right, but the bird flew true enough for her.

Every spring after, a pair of swallows nested under the chandlery eaves, and every spring Bess counted them in from the window with one finger pressed to the glass. Seven springs she counted. The eighth year there was only one bird, and it sat on the harbour wire for three days with its head tucked in, and then it was gone too, and so was the Carrick Lass, somewhere past the Skerries with nothing but fog for company.

On the ninth spring the wire sang with a single swallow, and Bess put on her oilskins and went down the quay, past Tam's shed, which was boarded up by then. She stood at the end of the mole with the wind pulling at her hair until the bird lifted, swung out over the grey water in a long low curve, and dropped towards the sea. Then, from the far side of the bay, a hull came nosing round the point, low and slow, with a torn sail and one man at the wheel waving his cap. The swallow had come home first, as they always do, and that was how she knew.