Black and grey tattoo of two bird silhouettes above a stacked serif quote on the ribs, with pale fabric draped across the torso.

Two birds and quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two solid black bird silhouettes above a block of small serif lettering that reads 'we only part to meet again' followed by the date 9-17-12. The birds have filled, clean edges with no shading, and the lettering is crisp and evenly spaced. The side of the torso fills most of the frame, with pale, loosely draped fabric at the top and soft natural light on the skin.

Lettering Ribs Bird Quote Text Date Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swifts left Gallows Wells the same week the Harlan brothers sold the forecourt, which my mother said was no coincidence. I was nineteen and had taken the night shift at the pumps because nobody else would drive the thirty miles of dark between Tanner's Flat and the highway. Out there you learn to read the sky by its birds, and these two had nested in the rusted sign above pump four for three summers running.

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On the seventeenth of September I found them on the concrete apron, two small dark shapes that had struck the kiosk glass and gone still. I carried them inside in a cardboard tray that once held Lucky Strikes and set it on the counter beside the cash drawer. The bigger one lifted its head and looked at me the way Mr Okonedo used to look at a bald tyre before he told you it would hold. I said I'd keep them until morning.

Dale had written his last note to me on the back of a diesel receipt, pressed under the wiper of my Cortina the week before he drove east for good. Four words and a date, in his careful schoolteacher capitals: WE ONLY PART TO MEET AGAIN. I had read it so often the paper went soft. That night, with the birds breathing quick and shallow in their tray, I took the receipt from my pocket and laid it flat beside them, the date on it matching the one I'd been counting toward all summer.

By six the sun was up over the salt flats and the older bird was gone from the tray, sitting on the sign above pump four as if it had never been hurt. I watched it wheel south over the empty road. I did not follow it. I folded the receipt back into my pocket and went to open the shutters.