Colour botanical tattoo on the lower torso showing an open birdcage, two birds in flight and pink roses with blue forget-me-nots.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open birdcage with birds and roses

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

An open birdcage with an ornate wooden base sits among pink roses and small blue flowers, with two birds flying out of the cage towards the upper right. The linework is soft with painted shading, and loose green and orange splashes run through the composition. Colour ink dominates the design, with the cage shown in warm wood tones and the birds in dark blue and rust.

Botanical Other Birdcage Bird Rose Flower Forget-me-not Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage had been hanging in the solar since before my mother came up the hill to keep the gate, and nobody had thought to take it down. Its door hung open on one hinge, as if whoever last used it had only stepped out to fetch bread. Rain came through the broken roof and ran down the wooden base, and the roses that had seeded themselves along the curtain wall leaned in through the gap as if they wanted to look.

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Lady Maud Ferrers had kept finches there, so the stories said, and she had let them go the winter the lord's men marched south. Nobody in the village would say why. Old Tam swore the birds still came back at dusk to sit on the iron dome and sing at the stones. I did not believe him until the June I found forget-me-nots growing up through the cage floor, blue as a bruise and twice as stubborn.

I cut the roses back that summer and carried the cuttings down to the cottages, but I left the cage alone. Every evening I climbed the stair to the solar with my boots full of mud and sat on the sill where the wall had gone to rubble. The swallows nested in the rafters. Once, a robin landed on the wooden base and looked at me as if I owed it rent.

When the autumn gales came, I finally lifted the cage down, meaning to take it to the church for safekeeping. The door swung wide in my hands, and out of the dark wood two small birds burst past my face, rust-breasted and dark blue against the grey sky. They went straight over the wall towards the sea. I stood there holding the empty cage and found I had been holding my breath for a week, and I let it go.