Black and grey photograph of a small tattoo of two flying swallows above the script phrase 'you can go now' on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Two birds and script on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small solid black bird silhouettes fly side by side, one slightly lower and angled towards the left, above a line of handwritten script that reads 'you can go now'. The birds are filled with solid ink and the lettering is a thin, flowing monoline, with the design sitting on pale skin in a black and white photo taken against a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Bird Swallow Script Text Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the col just as the wind turns, and the cairn is already crowded with stones that other walkers have left for the people who came before them. Your guide, a woman named Ilse who has crossed this saddle every September for thirty years, has her back to the drop and is tying a knot in the rope with fingers that have gone white at the tips. She doesn't look at you when she speaks. She is watching the two swifts that have come up out of the valley below, skimming the updraft as if the mountain were a ladder they had been told to climb.

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You want to ask her whether they are lost. Instead you ask whether the path goes down the far side or along the ridge, and she laughs, a short bark that the wind takes off the rocks. Down, she says. There is always down. The birds tilt their wings and slide over the lip of the pass one after the other, close enough that you could have touched them with a trekking pole, and then they are gone into the blue haze over the next valley.

Ilse hands you the rope. Her palm is cold and dry. Go on, she says, you can go now, and it is not a dismissal but an invitation, the kind you give a child at the top of a slope when they have finally stopped asking to be carried. You step onto the scree. Behind you the cairn hums in the wind, and the swifts, far below already, turn once over the river and do not look back.