Black and grey birdcage with two birds and blue flowers tattooed on the outer thigh of a person lying on white sheets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage and birds on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A birdcage with two birds, one perched on top and one swooping below, sits on the outer thigh. The birds and cage are shaded in black and grey, with a few blue flowers and leaves curling around the lower edge. The thigh is photographed at an angle on white bedding, with a white shirt printed with birds visible at the top of the frame.

Thigh Birdcage Bird Swallow Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage had hung in the front bay of Sealcombe House since before my mother bought the lease, and in thirty-one summers nobody had opened its little brass door. Lodgers asked about it over breakfast. Mum said it was for ornament, which was a lie, because she fed whatever lived in it every morning at six with a teaspoon of millet and talked to it the way she never talked to us.

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The swallows came in June, two of them, nesting under the eaves above the bay. One stayed on the cage roof all day, flicking its tail at the gulls. The other flew in and out of the sitting room window, catching flies over the tea urns, and Mum swore it was the same pair that had come every year since 1979. When the August lodgers left owing three weeks, she sat on the bottom stair with the ledger open on her knees and didn't write a single figure.

That was the morning I unhooked the cage. I carried it down the garden path past the tamarisk, the wire door stiff with salt. I didn't ask permission. I turned the latch and stepped back, half expecting her to shout from the kitchen window. Nothing came out at first, and I felt a fool standing there with my arms still curled around nothing.

Then a swallow dropped off the bay roof and slid through the open door, low over the lupins, and the other came down out of the blue to meet it. They went up together over the harbour wall, two dark commas against the white sky. The empty cage swung once on its hook and went still. Mum appeared at the back door with a tea towel over her shoulder, looked at the cage, then at me, and said, well, that's the rent sorted, and went back inside.