Black silhouette design of three swallows in flight with the script words every little thing gonna be alright, on a plain white background.

Three swallows in flight with script quote

Black and grey · Flash

Three solid black silhouettes of swallows fly in a diagonal line, the largest at upper right and the smallest at lower left, with forked tails and swept wings. Above and to the left of the birds, a line of flowing black cursive script reads every little thing gonna be alright. The design is high contrast black on white with no shading or colour, and the composition leaves generous empty space around the motif.

Swallow Bird Script Quote Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and pass me that lamp, because this story is older than the lamp and does not like to be told in the dark. The Saltward lofts kept forty swallows in the old rail tunnel under Corrin Hill, and every morning Mother Idris Quaye counted them in with a bent pin and a tally stick. Three went out the week the eastern dykes broke: the big dark one first, as it always did, then the middle one, then the little grey runt with the torn left wing, which nobody expected to see again.

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They carried the messages between the drowned towns and the high farms, a scrap of oilcloth tied to the leg and a name written small. Tobin Ashe, who was nine and furious about being left behind, was given the job of feeding what came home, and he learned their habits. The big one, he said, flew as if it owned the sky and was ashamed to admit it. The middle one simply kept up. The runt sang at the window before dawn, and it sang the rhyme his mother used to say over the bread, though nobody had ever taught the bird a word of it.

Then the runt came home last, as it always did, with the oilcloth still knotted to its leg. Mother Idris unpicked the knot with her teeth because her fingers would not stop shaking. Inside there was no message from the high farms. There was only a line in pencil, in a hand Tobin did not recognise, and it read every little thing gonna be alright. She said she had written it herself that morning, on a blank scrap, to see whether the birds would still bother to fly it.

So the three of them went back on the sill, the big one, the middle one, and the runt that had come home last, and nobody ever called it a runt again. Mother Idris tallied them in with the bent pin. Forty-three, she said, which was the number she had started with before anyone went out. Tobin believes she counted wrong on purpose, so the birds would have one more reason to come back.