Back and shoulder of a person with fine line black tattoos of a birdcage, a sailing ship sketch and script above the shoulder, with the head turned away.

Birdcage and ship tattoos on a shoulder and back

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back and upper arm show several small black tattoos, including a birdcage on the upper arm, a sketched sailing ship, a small ring outline and a lower-back birdcage. Above the shoulder sits a line of script that appears to be Hebrew lettering. The linework is thin and sketchy with little shading, and the image is entirely in black and grey ink, shot against white bedding with the face hidden by a raised hand and hair.

Fine line Upper arm Back Birdcage Ship Script Ring Sketch

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

Pell had been paid in advance for the cage, which was the first thing that made him uneasy. The man who commissioned it did not haggle, did not ask for the wire gauge or the spacing of the bars, only that the door should close with a sound a bird would not forget. He left a ring of brass on the bench as surety, worn thin on one side as if a thumb had turned it a thousand times, and walked out past the wharf toward the Halcyon, which was taking on water at the Pool.

Keep reading

Pell worked through the wet afternoon with his lamp hung from a nail. He bent the iron and tapped the hinge pins home. Gulls came down to the sill and looked in at him, and he thought of the tale his mother used to tell, of a sailor who carried a songbird aboard so the sea could never say it had taken him without a witness. Nobody had ever told him whether that sailor came home.

When the cage was finished he carried it down to the quay in a sack, because it was bad luck to show a cage in daylight before it had a bird in it. The Halcyon was already loosed from her moorings. On her stern someone had painted a row of letters he could not read, hooked marks like a fence in the rain, and beneath them a ship sketched in pencil only, never inked, as if her captain meant to finish the picture later.

Pell waited until she cleared the breakwater. Then he went back to the bench and found the brass ring gone and a single grey feather lying where it had been, the same grey as the sails in pencil. He understood then that the cage had never been meant to hold a bird, only to be carried out to sea empty and brought back to him.