Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a black birdcage with leaves and splashes of colour and flying birds across the ribs and side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birdcage with watercolour birds on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of an open birdcage with leafy vines sits at the centre, with bright splashes of red, orange, blue, green and yellow spreading outwards. Small coloured birds appear to fly from the cage and drift up towards the chest and down towards the hip. The ink has soft, bleeding edges with solid black linework on the cage, and the composition runs diagonally across the side of the torso.

Ribs Birdcage Bird Leaves Vine Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage door hangs open before you reach the back kitchen, and the canary is standing on the sill as if someone has told it a secret. Your father's boots steam by the range. Up the row the pit wheel is already turning, a slow iron clatter you feel in your teeth more than you hear it. Your mother says the canary goes down with the men so they will know when the air turns bad. You have never liked that arithmetic. Yesterday you carried the cage down the lane to the wash-house, and the bird sang the whole way, so loudly the women came out to their doorsteps to listen.

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Your father finds you there with the cage still in your hands and doesn't scold. He sits on the step and takes off his cap, the coal dust in its creases dark as ink. "Go on, then," he says, and nods at the open wire. You understand that he has been turning the same thought over for years, that a man can only breathe for other people for so long before he forgets his own lungs belong to him. The bird hops to the rail, then the washing line, then the tin roof of the screening house, where two starlings are already squabbling over a crust.

You watch it climb over the spoil heap. Against the smoke, the bird is not grey at all but a streak of red and blue and sunburnt orange, as if it has been dipped in every colour the valley has ever been without. Your father pulls his cap back on. The whistle sounds, long and flat, and the row fills with men pulling on their lamps. You go inside and set the kettle on the range, leaving the cage empty on the table, its little brass hook still swinging.