Black ink drawing of three birds flying out of an open birdcage, with shaded wings and a shaded base on the cage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three birds flying from an open birdcage

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing shows an open domed birdcage on the left with three birds flying away to the right. The cage is drawn with fine vertical and horizontal bars, and the birds have shaded wings and dark accents on their bodies. The image is in black and grey on a white background, with the cage and birds arranged across the frame.

Birdcage Bird Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage came in on the 6.14 from Leeds, wedged under a bench in the third carriage with its little door hanging open, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. Nobody claimed it. The form went into the tray, the tray went into the cupboard, and by the end of the month it had become the thing I looked at over my tea.

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Mr Halloran in the cloakroom said it was a canary cage, the sort his mother kept in the front room in Castleford, and that canaries never leave once they've been fed. I told him that was the sort of thing people said about husbands. He laughed and said I'd been reading too many of the paperbacks on the bookstall.

In November the sparrows came. Three of them sat on the iron roof of platform four through a whole wet Tuesday, shifting their feet and saying nothing, and when the lamps came on at four they went at the cage together. They didn't go in. They went round it, close, as if the bars were an argument they had decided to win. One landed on the open door and turned its head to look at me. I swear it looked at me the way a man looks at a clerk who has been holding his parcel too long.

I carried the cage out to the bench that evening and set it down with the door facing the footbridge. They lifted all at once, over the coal yard and the signal box, and the last thing I saw was the pale underside of one wing catching the lamp. The cage stayed where it was. Mr Halloran signed the disposal form himself the next morning, unclaimed, and didn't ask me why I'd left the door open.