Back shoulder tattoo of a bird in flight with sketchy black linework and blue, purple and pink watercolour washes, with the word freedom in script beside it.

Watercolour bird with freedom script on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bird in flight is tattooed across the upper back and shoulder blade, drawn with loose black linework that trails off into sketchy strokes. The wings and body are filled with blue, violet and pink washes that bleed softly outward, resembling watercolour. The word freedom appears in black script on the left, and the composition is cropped close to the shoulder.

Back Shoulder Bird Wing Freedom Script Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top has three tears in it by the time the last matinee starts, and Halloran has stopped pretending he will mend them. You stand in the wings with chalk on your palms and count the empty seats, which is easier than counting the wages still owed. Behind you the ring curtain hangs with its painted bird, a rough thing of violet and blue that the old scene-painter did for a bet, and the rain has run the colours so the wings look like they are dissolving.

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Nobody has fed the animals properly since the spring. The last of them is a grey-throated bird in a brass cage on the prop wagon, bought off a Dutch dealer for a trick that never worked. You have been feeding it from your own bread for a month. Someone has chalked FREEDOM on the wagon door in capitals, and yesterday Halloran said the bird is going to a man in Skegness who keeps parrots for the pub. You said nothing. You have been a coward in this tent for eleven years.

Tonight the lights go down at nine and the tent is half empty. When the band strikes up for the flying act you do not climb the ladder. You walk to the wagon, work the little brass latch with a hairpin, and lift the door. The bird does not move for a long moment. Then it goes up through the nearest tear in one black slash of wing, and the lamps catch it, and for a second the whole top is full of blue and pink light bleeding out through the canvas.

Halloran shouts your name from the ring. You hear the crowd murmur as they look up. Somewhere out over the wet field the bird is already a smudge above the hedgerow, and you find you are laughing, the way you laugh when a fall turns out to be a catch. Let him shout. The door is open, and for once you are the one who opened it.