Black dotwork and fine line tattoo of an ornate birdcage with a hanging key and beaded chain on the inner forearm, shown against a red wall.

Birdcage and key on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

An ornate birdcage with an open door and scrollwork detail hangs from a beaded chain that ends in a decorative key. The design is built from fine black outlines filled with stippled dots, with the stippling giving the cage and ornaments a soft shaded texture. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits diagonally across the forearm against a plain red background.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Birdcage Key Chain Bead Scrollwork Ornament

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the aviary keys for nineteen years, and in all that time nobody had asked him why the old cage in the cloister garth still hung open. The door had rusted that way under the abbot before Wendel, and the birds that once sang in its scrolled dome had long since gone to the hedgerows beyond the wall. I reckoned leaving it as it was a kind of penance, though I never told anyone so.

Keep reading

Then in the cold spring a novice called Thomas came to me with a box of wrens he had taken from a snare in the orchard. He was crying, and I could not blame him. We set them loose in the cage together, one by one, and they would not go in. They sat on the threshold and stared at the sky as though it were a trick the brothers had played on them.

I told him about the key that hung from the chain at the cage's base, the one nobody had turned since before the Dissolution. It was a small silver thing, worn smooth by a hundred thumbs. I lifted it from its hook in the sacristy, and the beads of the chain knocked against my wrist as I carried it out. The lock gave with a sound like a dropped spoon.

The wrens did not come out for an hour. Then the smallest one hopped to the open door, paused, and went not up but down, through the gap at the bottom, into the grass where the wall ended and the afternoon began. Thomas laughed until he hiccupped. I went back to the sacristy and hung the key on its nail, and I have been wondering since whether an open door is any use to a bird that has forgotten how to leave.