Black ink tattoo of three small bird silhouettes above the cursive French script tu me manques, placed on a shoulder.

Three birds and French script on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Three small solid black bird silhouettes sit above a line of cursive French script reading tu me manques, rising slightly to the right. The birds are filled shapes with simple outlines, while the lettering uses fine, even strokes with a long crossed t. The ink is solid black on lightly toned skin, and the shot is taken close up with the shoulder filling most of the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Bird Swallow Script French text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the stove is only warm on this side. You want the swallows story, the one about Marie-Thérèse and the pit at Liévin? Good. Then listen, because I tell it once and the coal dust in my throat will not give me a second go.

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Every morning the cage went down at five, and the women stood at the lamp-house gate counting the men back up. Marie-Thérèse counted three birds on the wire above the washhouse, because her husband Joseph had a habit of whistling three notes before he went under. Three swallows came each spring to the slag heap, and she swore they were his. Nobody laughed at her. The mine took laughter the way it took everything else.

The winter the roof came in on the eastern gallery, the post office shut and no letter could leave the valley. So she took a stub of chalk from the schoolroom and wrote on the back step, tu me manques, in the looping hand the nuns had beaten into her. Every dawn she wrote it again. The rain washed it off, so she wrote it again.

Joseph came up on the ninth day, grey as the shale, and read the step before he read his wife. Then the three swallows dropped off the wire and walked along the chalk letters as if they were reading too. Some say birds only land where there is something to eat. I say they knew the words better than the rest of us.