Black silhouette flash design of two swallows in flight above the words we only part to meet again, in a serif typeface on a white background.

Two swallows above a quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Two solid black swallow silhouettes fly in opposite directions, one on the left and one on the right, with forked tails and swept wings. Beneath them, the words we only part to meet again are set in a serif lowercase typeface on two centred lines. The design uses only black ink on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Swallow Bird Quote Text Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second swallow has gone from the eaves before you reach the bottom of the back stairs, and the first is still wheeling over the bins as if nobody had told it the season was over. Mrs Pellow says they leave when the wind backs round to the east, and she says it the way she says everything about the house, as though the sea had consulted her and agreed. You have four rooms to strip before the Thursday coach, and a lodger's letter sitting on the hall table since Monday.

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The letter is addressed to a Mr Ambrose Tull at a boarding house in Harwich you have never heard of, and the handwriting is a schoolteacher's, round at the bottoms of the letters. You turn it over twice. Inside the back cover of the register, where guests write their names and their opinions of the weather, someone has pencilled a line you copied out once for the chalkboard: we only part to meet again. Nobody claimed it. It has the look of something a person says while buttoning a coat in a doorway.

You carry the envelope to the postbox at the corner, past the shuttered ice cream kiosk and the boy hosing down the pavement outside the chemist. The first swallow follows you as far as the lamp post, then turns back over the roofs toward the house, where the nest is cracked along one side from last winter's gale. You know without looking that it will be there in April, patched with mud and straw, waiting for whoever comes back.

At the box you hold the envelope a moment longer than the postman would like. Then you let go, and the slot takes it with a small, decided sound. Behind you the bird is a black cut-out against the grey harbour wall, heading south at last, and you find yourself counting the weeks to spring on your fingers.