Black and grey photo of a fine line tattoo of an open birdcage on one inner wrist, with a flock of birds flying across to the other wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage and birds across two wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two pale wrists placed side by side against a dark background. On the left wrist, a birdcage with its door open is drawn in thin black outline, and a small bird sits near the opening. On the right wrist, a flock of about eight small black birds flies in a loose diagonal line, with the flight path suggesting movement from the cage across to the other arm.

Fine line Forearm Birdcage Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird had been aboard the Marigold since Gravesend, and by the time she raised the Cape nobody could say who had bought it. Old Tobias Quill kept it in a cage of ship's oak with a door that latched on a brass hook. The cook swore it sang before rain. The mate swore it sang before everything, and that was why he wanted it gone.

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Nell, Tobias's granddaughter, was cabin boy that year, and she was the only one allowed to open the cage. Each morning, while the watch was swabbing the decks, she lifted the hook and let the bird sit on the rail with the wind in its feathers. It never went far. It would lift, circle the mainmast twice, and drop back onto her wrist as if it had only been to fetch something. "It's counting us," her grandfather said. "Making sure we're still here."

Off the Agulhas bank the mate caught her at it and carried the cage down to the hold, saying the bird would go over the side at the next squall. Nell did not sleep. Near midnight she crept below, found the latch, and carried the cage up to the bow where the lamp could not reach. She opened the door and held very still. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the bird was gone, a grey scrap against the stars, and she felt the cold of its absence in her hands.

Morning brought a flock. Eight small dark birds came low over the water and wheeled above the bowsprit, and Tobias, leaning on the rail with his pipe, saw the one in the lead break away and dip to meet the cage-bird halfway. Together they turned north-east, toward a coast none of them had charted, and the cage swung empty on its hook for the rest of the voyage.