Colourful illustrative tattoo of a bird with antler-like branches, a birdcage and a heart on an upper arm, shown in three side-by-side photos.

Bird with antlers and birdcage on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bird with a teary eye and antler-like branches topped by pink trees sits above a purple mountain with hatched black linework, a small heart, bones and anchors. A red-outlined birdcage and red sketched foliage overlap the right side, with dotwork and teal lightning-bolt shapes adding texture. Three photographs of the same arm show the tattoo from slightly different angles, with colour ink dominating.

Upper arm Bird Antler Tree Birdcage Heart Bone Anchor Mountain Lightning Eye Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird had been in the cage since Tuesday, and by Thursday she had stopped singing when the post van came up the glen. Dad said she was pining for the lowland orchards. I said she was pining for the larch on the north face, where frost had got into the sap and the branches had grown up into antlers, pink-headed with lichen, so that half the village had stopped going that way. Nobody believed me. Nobody had climbed high enough to look.

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I carried the cage up the old quarry road on Friday, past the rusted anchors stacked at the bend like dropped bread. The heather had gone the colour of bruises. Someone had lined the wall with bones, sheep or deer, and I didn't stop to find out which. The cage knocked against my hip with every step, and the bird turned one bright eye on me the whole way, a bead of water at its corner that she never once wiped away.

At the col the wind came off the far side in a slap, and over the ridge a bolt of lightning split the grey without a drop of rain falling. I set the cage on the cairn and undid the little hook. She didn't go at first. Then she went, straight up, and the sky took the colour from her wings until she was only a tick above the pines. I stood there a long while with my hands empty, understanding that the cage had never been hers. It had been mine, and I had only needed someone to carry it up here.