Black and grey tattoos of an open birdcage on one calf and a flock of birds flying up the other calf, photographed from behind.

Birdcage and flying birds on calves

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, standing on grass in shorts and worn shoes, with a tattoo on each calf. The left calf carries an open birdcage with a domed top and vertical bars, drawn in fine outline with light shading. The right calf shows about six solid black bird silhouettes rising diagonally upwards. The image is black and white, with a soft, dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Adeyemi on the eleventh floor of Ashgrove House kept a canary in a cage with a domed top, and the whole block knew it, because the bird sang at five every morning and the song carried through the walls and down the lift shaft into the bins below. Nobody complained. People said it was company.

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One February the bird went quiet. Her grandson Kofi came up with a bag of seed and found the cage door standing open and the perch empty, and his grandmother sitting at the table with her hands flat on the oilcloth. She told him the old saying from her village, that a bird kept long enough forgets the sky, and that a caged thing will not sing again until someone opens the door and walks away from it. Kofi thought she was talking about the canary. She was talking about her husband, who had been dead four winters and had never once let her go anywhere she wanted to go.

Kofi did not argue. He carried the cage down eleven flights, because the lift had been broken since Christmas, and set it on the wet grass behind the bins. He left the door open and sat on the low wall with his phone switched off.

For a long minute nothing happened. Then a shape dropped out of the sycamore, then another, and then six or seven small dark birds wheeled once over the car park and climbed past the top of the tower as though they had always known the way up. The cage stayed empty on the grass. When Kofi got back upstairs, his grandmother was standing at the window with the seed bag still in her hand, watching the sky.

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