Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with three roses, an open birdcage and a bird in flight, in black and grey shading.

Roses, birdcage and flying bird design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing three roses clustered at the left and lower centre, an open domed birdcage in the middle and a small bird flying out at the upper right. Strings of beads hang down from the roses on the left. The linework is fine and the roses are shaded with soft graphite tones, with light and dark areas creating depth. The drawing is on a plain cream background with no colour.

Realism Rose Birdcage Bird Bead

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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

In the kingdom of Hollin Vale, where roses grew over the well-house and the priest kept his beads in a leather pouch, a cage-maker named Osric sold his birds in the market square. The finest of them sang only for him. Each morning he hung the cage from the hook above his door, and each morning the bird sang, and each morning the little door stayed shut, because his mother had told him that a thing which sings for you is a thing you own.

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His daughter Wenna grew tired of the song. One night while her father slept she drew back the bolt, opened the door and told the bird to go. It did not go. It sat on the silver rim and looked at her as though she were the one behind the wire, and she sat down on the step beside the cold hearth and waited for it to decide.

It stayed three days. It ate crumbs from her palm and once perched on the rim of her father's supper bowl. On the fourth morning Osric found the door open and shouted loud enough to wake the mill. The bird rose up through the window, over the rose hedge and the mill roof, and Osric ran after it with his beads knotted in one fist, calling on a saint who had never once answered him.

Wenna did not follow. She hung the empty cage back on its hook and watched the roses outside drop their petals, one at a time, through the open door, until the cage held nothing but red and the wind swung it gently against the wall.