Small fine line black tattoo of a bird flying towards an open birdcage, placed on the shoulder of a person with dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird flying from an open birdcage on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small black bird is shown in flight beside an open birdcage, both drawn with thin, delicate linework. The tattoo is in black ink only, with the cage's door shown ajar. It sits on the shoulder against soft, warm-toned skin, with the rest of the frame blurred in the background.

Fine line Shoulder Bird Birdcage Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Oswin Tall kept a linnet in a wicker cage hung from a nail beside his door at Skerry Haven. Every morning before the boats went out he opened the little door so the bird could sing at the water, and every evening he shut it again before the cold came up off the harbour wall. His wife said it was a daft habit. The bird had nowhere to go but the nail, she said, and the nail was not much of a place.

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In the February of the bad gale the fleet was caught out beyond the Ness. The boats came home with two men missing and the rest half drowned on their feet. Oswin's son Davy was one of the missing. For nine days Oswin walked the shingle at low tide and did not open the cage. The linnet went quiet on its perch. His wife took it in by the fire and fed it crumbs, and she said nothing about the door.

On the tenth morning a grey gull came down on the wall and would not leave, though the men threw stones at it. Oswin went to the nail with his hands shaking and found the cage door had sprung loose on its hinge in the night. The linnet was gone. Far out past the breakwater, a small brown shape was flying low over the swell, heading towards the Ness where the boats had been.

Davy walked into the village at dusk with frost on his collar, having been put ashore at Lerwick by a Norwegian trawler. Oswin hung the empty cage back on its nail and left the little door standing open. He did it every night after that, and nobody in Skerry Haven ever asked him why.