Black and white flash design of a small bird perched on a branch above a three-part banner reading Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures.

Bird on a branch with banner quote

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A bird perches on a branch at the top of the design, with bare trees drawn in the background. Below it, a banner wraps across three tiers and carries the lettering Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures. The linework is bold and white on black, with shaded banner folds and a scalloped white border framing the whole sheet.

Traditional Bird Branch Banner Lettering Tree Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Calder House could say when the thrush first came to the balcony rail, only that it was there every morning before the lorries started on the ring road. Dinah Mollison kept a saucer of crusts on the sill for it, and the bird took them with a little bow of its head, as though the crusts were rent it had been waiting to pay.

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The old women on the estate had a saying about birds like that. Rise free from care before the dawn, they said, and seek what the day has hidden, for a bird that sings before light has not yet been told what it cannot do, and it is unwise to tell it. So when the lift went dead in the second week of March and the council wrote to say it would be looked at in due course, Dinah's grandson Tomi, who was nine and had never been further than the bins, decided he would go down the stairs and find the river himself.

He set off at first light with a heel of bread in his pocket. The thrush waited on the rail of every landing, hopping ahead and looking back to see he was still coming. On the ninth floor the stairwell smelt of bleach and wet cardboard. On the fourth a dog barked behind a door and the bird did not even turn its head.

At the bottom the doors opened onto the car park, where bare plane trees stood in a row by the bins, black against a sky going the colour of weak tea. The thrush landed on the lowest branch and sang one long run of notes. Across the estate the lorries woke and the lights came on in the flats one by one. Tomi understood, standing there with his bread, that the bird had not brought him down to see the river. It had brought him down so he could climb back up before anyone was awake to ask where he had been.

He was on the rail with the crusts in the saucer when Dinah opened the door in her dressing gown. She said nothing about the stairs. She only put the kettle on and let the thrush finish its breakfast.