Black fine line drawing of an open birdcage with a small bird flying out of it, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open birdcage with a bird flying out

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A simple line drawing of an open birdcage with its door swung open, shown in the upper right of the frame. A small bird in flight sits to the left, leaving the cage. The linework is thin and uniform in black ink, with no shading or colour, and the design sits on a plain white background with generous empty space around it.

Fine line Birdcage Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Pryce kept the lamp at Carrowmere halt, and every winter the wind came up the cutting with a sound like somebody calling a name from the far end of the platform. She kept a canary too, in a brass cage hung from the ticket hatch. Her husband had brought it back from Liverpool the year before he died, and she could not bring herself to sell it, nor to let it out.

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One January a goods train stalled short of the platform in fog, and a porter called Dan Ellery was sent down the line with a lamp to find the fault. He came back frozen to the bone and sat by her stove while the canary sang. She asked if the line was clear. He said it was. Then she asked him to open the cage door, and when he did, the bird sat on its perch and would not move, because it had forgotten there was any sky beyond the wire.

Dan went home that night thinking about it. He thought of his own mother, who had never once left the valley, and of the express that ran past every morning without stopping. Three weeks later the station closed for the winter works and he came to collect the lamp. The cage hung open on its hook, the brass door swung wide, and the bird was gone. There were feathers on the sill and a thread of dried grass caught on the wire.

Mrs Pryce was sitting in the thin sun on the bench at the far end of the platform, watching the signals. She did not turn round. She said she had only opened the door, and that was all anybody could do for anything. Dan looked at the empty cage, then at the grey sky over the cutting, where a small bird was crossing above the gantry towards the hills.