Colour tattoo of a brown songbird inside a wreath of leaves, flowers and berries with the words FREE INDEED above it, on the upper arm.

Bird and floral wreath with lettering on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A brown songbird stands inside a circular wreath of green leaves, yellow, blue and red flowers, and red berries. The words FREE INDEED sit in black capitals across the top of the wreath. The bird has soft shading and fine detail in its feathers, while the flowers use bright, flat colour with fine outlines, set against pale skin and a grey top.

Botanical Lettering Upper arm Bird Songbird Wreath Flower Leaves Berry Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage in the Queen's solar has hung so long that ivy has crept through its bars, and every morning you are the one sent up the stairs with millet and a jug of rainwater. Nobody else in Hallowmere wants the job. The steward says the thrush is sullen, the ladies say it stares, and you have a sister in the laundries and a mother whose knuckles are knotted from the wash-tubs. A wage is a wage.

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You bring a wreath each time, woven from whatever the walled garden offers: sage, blue chicory, red hips nobody has pruned since the floods. You make it on the sill because your hands need work while the bird watches. It watches the way a magistrate watches a thief. Then one thaw morning it hops down and pecks a berry that has fallen through the bars, and you see its speckled breast is the same brown as the eggs in the bishop's reed nest by the moat.

By midwinter it knows your whistle. You have taught it the two words a travelling tinker once bellowed in the market square: free indeed, which he swore the gate-wardens promised to anyone who paid the toll. You did not believe him then. On the last frost you carry the cage down to the postern, lift the little door, and climb back up without looking round, because the steward's boots are already ringing on the stone below.

By noon the thrush is over the moat and gone among the elms. The next morning, when you return with millet nobody will eat, the wreath is still on the sill, pecked at one side, and a single brown feather lies in the middle of the blue flowers. You leave it there.