Traditional style colour tattoo of a yellow bird perched on a black birdcage with a red heart and red flowers, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow bird on a birdcage with a red heart

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A yellow bird with grey-shaded wings sits on top of a black birdcage with a red heart in its centre. Red flowers with green leaves frame the cage at the upper right, left and bottom, and the cage bars are shaded in black and grey. Bold black outlines and saturated colour give the piece a classic flash look, shown against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at the cage yet, lad. Look at the bird on top, because she's the one with the sense. Yellow as a custard tart and twice as pleased with herself. Mabel, the Pavilion Ballroom called her, and she sang over the Saturday waltzes from a perch above the bandstand. Girls in white gloves stopped dancing to hear her hit the top note, and Sid Carrow, the bandleader, swore she was worth two trumpets and a tuba.

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Sid kept her in a cage as black as a funeral hat, the bars so thin you only saw them when the lights swept round. At its centre he'd painted a red heart on a tin plate, and every night before the doors opened he touched it for luck. Nobody asked what for. Mabel seemed content enough, with her patch of sky through the top and the paper roses the cleaners left on the sill.

Then came the winter the ballroom flooded. The cage was left in the coat room with its little door swung open, because somebody had been feeding her and forgot the latch. Mabel didn't fly off to the hills like a sensible bird. She perched on top of that cage, cocked her head, and sang the whole of the last waltz to an empty hall while the water rose round the bandstand legs.

Sid came back at dawn with a sack of coal and found her still there. He never latched the cage again. Said a heart that stays put when the door's open has made its own choice. Now go on home. Your mother's calling, and you've still not finished your pop.

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