Black and grey botanical tattoo of a blossoming branch with an open birdcage and bird across the upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Branch and birdcage on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bare branch with small blossoms curves across the upper back and over the shoulder, with a birdcage hanging from a thin twig on the left. The cage has an open door and a bird sits inside, drawn in clean black linework with light shading. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo framed against soft blurred background and skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the cup down and listen, because the bird is not the part of this story you need to worry about. Long ago, in the hill town of Tarsa where the almond trees pushed right up against the walls, there lived a cage-maker called Erim. His reeds were so finely woven that the merchants swore they could hold water. He made one cage for himself, hung it from the lowest branch of the almond outside his door, and every morning he unhooked the little latch and left the door open.

Keep reading

A grey finch with a splinted wing came to him that first spring. It hopped inside at dusk and out again at dawn, and the town thought Erim a fool. A cage with no lock, they said, is only a fence you have agreed to. Erim only laughed and kept the door open. Each spring the blossom fell on his roof in pink handfuls, and the finch sang among it as if the whole orchard belonged to him.

Then came the winter the river froze hard enough to walk across. One grey morning Erim climbed his ladder and found the little door swinging on its hinge and the perch empty. He searched the yard, the eaves and the well. At last he looked up. The finch sat on the bare branch above the cage, fat with seed, singing to a sky that had nothing in it yet but cold. A single blossom came loose and settled on the open cage, and neither of them moved to chase it.

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