Black ink tattoo of two swallows above the words We Only Part To Meet Again in a typewriter-style font, on the side of the torso.

Two swallows above a quote on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two solid black silhouettes of swallows in flight sit above two lines of text reading We Only Part To Meet Again, set in a typewriter-style serif. The birds and letters are rendered in dense, uniform black ink with crisp edges and no shading. The photograph is taken at a slight angle on warm-toned skin, with the text centred in the frame.

Lettering Ribs Swallow Bird Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last mule was already over the saddle when Agnes Marr found her brother's boots still standing by the door of the Gap House. Snow lay in the ruts of the track, and the swallows had not yet come back to the eaves above the hearth, though she had been counting the days since Candlemas with notches scratched into the lintel.

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Tam had gone down the valley at first light with a bundle on his back and a ticket for a steamer that sailed from Hartlow on Monday. He had left the boots because they pinched, he said, and because a man walking to the sea had no need to look like he was walking back. She had laughed at that, and then found she could not stop thinking about it.

On the third morning a pair of swallows came sweeping up the gully, low and fast, and dropped into the old nest under the beam as if they had never been anywhere else. Agnes stood in the yard with a pail of cold water and watched them chatter. Her brother had always said birds knew only one road, and it ran back to the same roof. She set the boots by the fire to dry, then went out to meet the postman coming up the pass with the week's letters.

The envelope was in Tam's careful hand, a single sheet creased from the sea air. Inside, in the typewritten script of the Hartlow office, he had copied out a line from a song their mother used to hum: We Only Part To Meet Again. Below it he had drawn two small birds, wings swept back, one flying a little ahead of the other. Agnes read it twice, tucked it beneath the boot strap, and went to put the kettle on.