Two raised forearms side by side: the left has a pink rose and birdcage tattoo with teal leaves, and the right has a grey geometric triangle and key design on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, birdcage and geometric key on forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are raised with the wrists touching, showing a tattoo on each. The left arm has shaded pink roses with teal leaves, a black birdcage with a hanging key, and fine dotted accents. The right arm has grey fine-line triangles, dotted linework, and a key wrapped with a ribbon, set against a plain light background.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Forearm Rose Birdcage Key Ribbon Triangle Leaves Dot Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernathy came up the canal steps on a Tuesday with a birdcage under his arm and no bird in it, and I took that as a bad sign before he had said a word. Four generations of Quayles have kept the shop under the bridge. We have opened every stuck lock the river ever dropped on us, but nobody had ever asked me for a key to a door that was already open.

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He said his wife wanted one. The cage had a little brass catch on the base that had long since rusted shut, and she wanted it free so she could put something inside it again. I didn't ask what. I filed the bow of the key into three points, the way my father taught me, because a key should take the shape of the thing it promises to keep. Then I wound green ribbon round its shank from my mother's sewing tin, since Ada Abernathy had been a seamstress and it seemed wrong to hand her anything bare.

She was standing at the window when I brought it up, with a pot of pink roses on the sill and the light coming off the water onto her hands. She turned the key over twice, then pressed the catch. It gave with a small dry click, and she lifted the little door and looked inside for a long time at nothing at all.

She didn't put anything in it. She hung the key on a nail beside the window instead, where the ribbon caught the light, and said the cage was for remembering a thing that had flown, and the key was for remembering who had come to open it. I took my fee and walked home along the towpath, and the roses kept on opening behind me.