Black and grey fine-line tattoo of an open birdcage with three birds flying out, placed on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage with birds flying out on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed birdcage with an ornate dome top and an open door sits on the foot, with a bird leaving through the door. Three smaller birds fly upwards and away to the right, drawn in solid black silhouette. The linework is fine and the cage has light grey shading, set against pale skin on a textured carpet.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret had brought the little brass key in her coat pocket because she could not think what else a person was supposed to bring to a fortieth reunion. The cage had hung in the lower corridor of Ashdown Grammar for the whole of Year Nine, a dome of wire outside the chemistry lab with a canary inside that sang through every lunch bell. Its door had been wired shut since 1986, and Mr Pryce had sworn he'd lost the key.

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She found Tessa by the sports hall doors, holding a cup of warm prosecco and squinting at the basketball hoops as if they had shrunk. "You still have it?" Tessa said, nodding at Margaret's closed fist. "I thought the skip men had cleared everything out of that corridor."

"Mr Pryce gave it to me the week before he retired," Margaret said. "Said I was the only one who ever asked about the bird."

They walked out past the old bike sheds, which had been replaced by a car park with a sign for electric charging. At the edge of the tarmac a pigeon lifted off the wall, then another, then three more, clattering up past the floodlights into the dark. Tessa laughed and said, "Go on, then," to nobody in particular. Margaret didn't open anything. She turned the cold key over once, put it back in her pocket, and watched until the last pigeon came down on the gym roof and settled there, as if it had only stepped out to look.

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