Two coloured thigh tattoos: a birdcage holding a heart in an ornate frame on the left, and a red bird with a brain on the right, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage and bird with brain on thighs

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on the thighs. The left shows an open birdcage with a shaded heart inside, set in an ornate scrolled frame with a keyhole detail at the base. The right shows a crimson bird with a detailed brain on its body against a teal sky, framed by matching scrollwork.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter had a key on a ribbon round her neck, and nobody in Marrow Hollow ever asked what it opened. Her father had made the cage himself, from curled brass that he hammered cold in the winter the river froze, and he hung it in the orchard where the apple trees leaned over the wall. Inside it sat a heart the size of a fist, pink and careful, and it beat whenever the wind came up the valley, which was often.

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One morning in April a crimson bird came down out of the cloud over the ridge. It was not a robin or a crow. Its feathers were the red of a scalded lip and its eyes were green as the pond at the bottom of the lane. It landed on the wall and looked at the cage for a long time, then at the girl, and said that it had carried something heavy for a very long way and was tired of carrying it alone. The girl asked what. The bird opened its beak and a grey, folded brain came out, wrinkled as a walnut, and lay on the stones between them, humming softly to itself.

They sat there until noon. The bird talked and the brain listened, and the girl listened to both. By evening she had the key off her neck and was turning it in the small iron lock at the base of the cage. The heart did not fly out. It only stopped being afraid of the door. The bird took the brain up in its talons, the teal sky opened behind it like a window, and they went north together, saying nothing, which the old women of the hollow agreed was the wisest thing a pair of travellers could do.

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