Black flash design of two swallows in flight above the words we only part to meet again, set in black lettering on white.

Two swallows above a quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two solid black swallow silhouettes, one flying left and one right, with tail feathers forked and wings spread. Below them, centred, is the phrase "we only part to meet again" in black lowercase serif lettering. The image is flat black 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

Sit down, sit down, the lamps aren't lit yet, so you'll have to take my word for the colours. Every September the Michaelmas fair pitched on the water meadow below Stourbridge, and every September the swallows came down off the river to sit on the guy ropes of the big top as if they'd paid for a seat.

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Nell Brannock ran the fortune booth that year, and Tobias Lark ran the coconut shy beside her, and between the two of them they'd argued since Whitsun about money, about a borrowed horse, about nothing at all. On the last night a frost came early, the wagons were already loaded, and Tobias walked off north with his share in a tobacco tin without looking back. Nell watched the swallows lift off the ropes and head south over the church spire, and she told herself they had more sense than people.

Spring came round and the fair came back to the same meadow, because fairs always do. Nell was sweeping out the booth when she heard a scratching in the eaves, and there in the mud nest above the ticket hatch sat two swallows, close together and cross with each other, the way old married birds are. Tucked beneath them was a scrap of pasteboard from a coconut shy, and on it, in pencil, in a hand she'd know anywhere, someone had written the line the whole fair liked to shout at parting: we only part to meet again.

Tobias came up the lane that evening with his hat in his hands and a horse that had seen better decades. Nell didn't ask where he'd been. She only said the swallows had got there first, so he'd better sit on the step and wait his turn. Mind the step on your way out, now. The lamps are lit.