Colour realism tattoo across a torso with a black birdcage, pink rose, flowers and small birds, placed over the stomach and ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage and roses across the stomach

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large black birdcage sits at the centre of the torso, flanked by a detailed pink rose on the left and clusters of pink blossom and purple flowers on the right. Small birds and a butterfly are scattered among the flowers, with soft shading on the petals and a painterly yellow and blue wash behind them. The design wraps around the ribs and stomach and is framed by the navel at the bottom of the image.

Realism Botanical Ribs Other Birdcage Rose Flower Blossom Bird Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind you don't tell the gardener's boy where the spare key is kept, for he'll have that cage open before the frost and the finches halfway to the hedge by Sunday. That's how it was at Halfpenny Court, and that's how old Mrs Ashdown came to have the whole garden to herself, with the roses climbing the south wall and the iron cage hanging from its arm by the greenhouse, empty since the war.

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She kept the roses fat and pink, each one the size of a child's fist, and every April the blossom came down the gravel walk like confetti at a wedding nobody had invited the village to. The finches came each morning to pick at the seed she scattered under the cage. She talked to them the way you'd talk to a lodger who never paid his rent, and they tolerated it, which in a finch is a great kindness.

Then the surveyor came up the drive with his clipboard and his talk of selling the land for houses. He stood under the cage and said a brass lock like that was worth more than the whole greenhouse. Mrs Ashdown didn't argue. She simply swung the little door wide, went inside for the kettle, and left him to his tea. By the time he'd finished it, the finches had gone and so had the blossom off the walk, lifted on a wind that had no business blowing that hard in June.

His report said the site was unsuitable for building, owing to the birds. Mrs Ashdown lived to ninety-one. Some say the cage still hangs there with its door open, and if you stand beneath it in the spring, the petals drop onto your shoulders as though someone is counting you in.