Colour tattoo of an open ornate birdcage with orange scrollwork and teal feathers drifting out, on the upper arm, in a neo-traditional style.

Open birdcage and feathers on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

An open birdcage with a domed top and a heart-shaped filigree door sits on the upper arm, with two teal feathers drifting away from the opening. The cage has bold black linework and shaded orange and brown scrolled bands, while the interior and feathers use teal fills. The design is set against a plain skin background with a dark sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Upper arm Birdcage Feather Heart Scrollwork

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

Mr Okonedo never let me touch the heart door, not in four years at the bench behind the chandlery. "That's the part a bird remembers," he said, filing a curl of wire until it sat closed as a fist. The cages went out on the Tuesday boat to Ilfracombe and beyond, bought by fishwives for their canaries, and the wire was so fine you could see the harbour lamps through it at dusk.

Keep reading

Then Mrs Pell came in with a bird that had died in the night and a cage that had never been opened. She wanted it made open. Not broken, she said, open, the door swung wide and the dome lifted off like a lid on a pot of soup. Okonedo looked at her a long time, then at me, and told me to fetch the teal paint from the tin under the stairs, the one we used for boat trim.

We spent three days on it. I cut the feathers from a scrap of sail canvas and painted them by lamplight, two of them, because one feather is only a thing that fell. I set them drifting off the rim so they looked like they had only just left. Mrs Pell came back on the Friday and held the cage up to the window. She didn't cry. She turned it slowly, counting the scrolls with her thumb, then set it on the sill facing the sea.

Okonedo's bench is mine now. The heart door hangs open on the wall above it, and some mornings I find a single teal feather on the floor beneath, though I have never once seen it fall.