Black and grey swallow tattoo in flight beside the script words "and in time, this too shall pass" on a pale area of skin.

Swallow with script quote

Traditional · Black and grey · Photo

A swallow in flight is tattooed on skin, with its wings spread and its tail extended to the left. Fine grey linework and soft grey shading define the feathers and body, and the bird sits to the right of a handwritten script line reading "and in time, this too shall pass". The image is black and grey, with a dark background and uneven lighting across the skin.

Traditional Lettering Swallow Bird Script Quote Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train of the evening pulled out of Hollins Junction with its lamps swinging, and Maud Caddick stayed on platform two long after the guard had waved his flag. Above her, under the iron canopy, the swallows were still wheeling in and out of the gap where a pane had cracked in the spring. Her father had called them the station's lodgers. He said they paid their rent in mud and came back on the same day every year, which was more than could be said for the stationmaster.

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Eleven weeks had passed since the telegram from Leeds. Maud had sat with it on the waiting room bench, reading the single line until the words stopped meaning anything. Her mother had gone quiet after that, and the house on Sidings Lane seemed to hold too many clocks. Each morning Maud walked up to the station and checked the signal board, the lost property tin and the coal stove, because the work gave her hands something to do.

One evening Mr Ashworth, the porter with the bad knee, lowered himself onto the bench beside her and squinted up at the birds. "They'll be off by the end of the month," he said. "Then the roof goes quiet and you think it'll stay that way." He tapped the timetable lying in her lap. "And in time, this too shall pass. Your dad used to say it every time the Leeds train ran late. Never once did he believe it, mind, but he said it anyway."

At the end of September the nest was empty, and she climbed the ladder to look. There was only a cup of dried mud and one grey feather caught in the rafter. She tucked the feather into her coat pocket and, on the back of the Sunday timetable, wrote the line out in pencil the way her father used to write out tickets. Then she walked onto the platform as the first train of the morning came in, whistling through the cutting.