Watercolour style tattoo of birds flying out of an open birdcage, in pink, blue and purple washes with black linework, on the upper thigh.

Birds escaping a birdcage on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The design shows a black linework birdcage with its door open, with several birds in flight above and below it. Two larger birds in the lower half have pink, blue and purple washes and soft splashes of colour, while the cage and smaller birds are drawn in fine black lines. Colour ink dominates the composition, set against the skin of the upper thigh.

Thigh Birdcage Bird Flying bird Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate of finches had been on the harbour wall since Tuesday, and by Thursday Margit Doyle had stopped pretending it was none of her business. Gulls worked the tide line below, quarrelling over bread crusts, while the birds in the cage on the ferry office sill sang at nothing. Nobody on Inchgarrow bought a finch. They were kept for the look of the thing, a scrap of colour in a grey room, and the man who brought them over on the Saturday boat never stayed long enough to be asked why.

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Her nephew Callum, nine and impossible to hold still, had found the key on a nail behind the counter. He stood now with his thumb on the little brass catch, watching her as if she might tell him no. She did not. She thought of her mother's paintings, pale and running, the paper always gone soft at the edges, and how her mother used to say a bird stays a bird only until somebody opens the door.

The door swung wide with a tick of metal. For a moment nothing moved. Then a finch came out in a rush of rose and violet, climbing straight past the rafters, and two more went after it, blue as the rinse water in the jar on the bench. They caught the wind over the wall and scattered like thrown salt. Callum shouted. Margit laughed, which surprised her more than the birds did.

By evening the cage hung open on its hook, empty, its thin shadow lying across the counter. Margit wiped the sill and found a single pink feather stuck to the wood, dry and bright as a brushstroke. She pressed it into the ledger where the finch sales were written down and, under the last name, wrote nothing at all.