Black line drawing of an open birdcage with two roses, a bird flying out, a feather and a padlock, in a fine line style with no body placement shown.

Open birdcage with roses and a flying bird

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A fine black line drawing on paper shows an open ornate birdcage with a curled finial and filigree bands, wrapped with two roses on opposite sides. A small bird flies away from the cage on the right, and a loose feather and a padlock sit below. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading or colour, and the elements are spaced across the sheet with plenty of open space.

Fine line Botanical Birdcage Bird Rose Flower Feather Padlock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrow kept a linnet in a cage on the back deck of the narrowboat Patience, and every morning she hung it on the tiller hook so the bird could hear the water. The cage had come off a dead woman's stall in Banbury, its door wired shut and its brass finial bent like a question mark. The bird sang anyway. Nell said that was the only sensible thing anybody had done on that cut all winter.

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In March the lock-keeper at Hythe Bridge offered her a shilling for the cage. She refused, and he laughed and said a bird that could not leave was no bird at all. That night the ice on the towpath split with a crack like a gunshot. Nell sat up with a lamp and a pair of pliers, working the wire loose one twist at a time, until the padlock dropped into the bilge with a small bright sound.

The linnet did not go at once. It sat on the cabin roof a long while, looking at the poplars and the lock-keeper's chimney and the grey cut running off towards the sea. Then it rose over the hedge like a thrown glove, and a single grey feather came spinning down onto the water and drifted under the bridge.

Nell kept the cage. Boatmen going through Hythe lock still say she hung it empty on the hook each morning, and that she sang to it as if it could answer. The padlock stayed in the bilge, and nobody ever dredged for it. The feather she tucked behind the tiller, where the wind could take it whenever it liked.