Black script lettering reading She is clothed in strength and dignity, with three swallows, tattooed along the side of a foot.

Swallows and script quote on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo runs diagonally from the heel towards the toes along the side of the foot. It combines a flowing black script quote with three solid black silhouettes of swallows in flight, with the largest bird near the heel. The ink is a uniform dark black on pale skin, set against a plain clear plastic backdrop and a dark red surface.

Lettering Other Swallow Bird Script Quote Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the swallows came back to Carrow House, and every spring the caretaker, Mrs Ada Penrose, went up the forty-one flights with a bucket of wet clay because the lift had been broken since before the council changed its name. She did not mind the climb. She minded the mess the birds made on the landing windows, and she said so to anyone who would listen, which was nobody, because the flats were mostly empty by then.

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One April a girl moved into the top flat with a cardboard box of books and a radio that only picked up one station. She watched the swallows from the balcony rail. Ada found her there one evening, shivering in a thin coat, and asked what she was waiting for. The girl said she was waiting for the birds to decide whether they liked her. Ada laughed, the first time anyone had heard her laugh on that stairwell, and said swallows did not care who lived under them so long as the mud stayed put.

Ada had a saying her mother had taught her, from a book with a cracked spine: she is clothed in strength and dignity, and she shall rejoice in time to come. She said it to the girl the way you might hand over a spare key. Nobody on the estate knew whether she meant the birds or the girl or herself, and she never said.

The swallows left in September. In the morning the girl found three feathers on the balcony, dark as ink, set in a neat line on the concrete as if someone had placed them. She kept them in the book with the cracked spine, and when the new tenants came she left the bucket of clay by the door with a note that said, mind the forty-one.