Realistic colour tattoo of a barn owl with pink magnolia flowers and buds across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Barn owl and magnolias on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A barn owl perches among large pink and red magnolia blooms, with smaller buds on thin branches curving around its body. The owl is shaded in soft browns, oranges and greys, with fine feather detail on its wings and a smooth gradient across its face. Colour is used across the flowers and owl, set against a background of soft grey smoke-like shading on bare skin.

Realism Botanical Back Owl Barn owl Magnolia Flower Bud Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had worked nights at Wenlow General for nineteen years and had never once seen the barn owl that lived in the chapel roof, though the porters swore it sat on the bin store gate and watched them smoke. The magnolia by the ambulance bay was the only thing in the car park that bothered to bloom in March, and at ten past three on a wet Tuesday it dropped its first pale petals onto the tarmac like someone emptying a tin of coins.

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Ward 6 was hushed in the way that meant someone was dying slowly. In bed four Mr Okafor had stopped asking for his glasses and started asking for his daughter, who was somewhere on the M1 with the radio on. Dilys sat with him, held the cup of water to his lips, and told him about the owl, which was not strictly true, but it kept his eyes open. 'It's a barn owl,' she said. 'White face, like a heart somebody cut out of paper. It hunts the field behind the car park and comes back at dawn to sleep in the roof.'

He smiled and asked if it was lonely up there. She said owls didn't mind their own company, and he said that was the trouble with most people. Near four the daughter came through the doors with rain in her hair, and Dilys stepped back into the corridor so they could have the room to themselves.

Outside, the magnolia had shed another handful. Dilys picked up a bloom that had fallen whole, still cupped, pink at the edges and bruised dark at the root, and carried it in to the nurses' station. A minute later a shape slid past the high window, pale as a dropped sheet, and went up over the chapel roof without a sound.