Black and grey realism tattoo of a barn owl's face and feathered chest on the inner forearm.

Barn owl on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a barn owl with its heart-shaped face turned towards the viewer, one dark eye visible and the other partly in shadow. The feathers are rendered with fine, soft shading and scattered dark speckles across the chest, giving a detailed, photographic texture. The owl fills the forearm, with the dark background shading fading into bare skin at the edges of the frame.

Realism Forearm Owl Barn owl Feather Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barn owl came to the lamp above the pit yard the week the cage stuck at four hundred feet, and nobody in Shelter Hill could agree on what that meant. Mrs Pryce from the end house said it was a warning. My brother Dafydd said it was only an owl after the mice in the spoil heaps, which was true, and he said it with his jaw set, because he was nineteen and on the day shift now and wanted it understood that he did not believe in anything he could not weigh.

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I took the flask up the bank at dusk, the way Mam had when Dad was on nights, and found the bird sitting on the top rail of the fence by the old winding wheel. It turned its face to me slowly, that flat white heart of a face, and one eye held the last of the light while the other sat in shadow as if it had been asked to keep something back. It did not look at the headframe or the dark mouth of the shaft. It looked at me the way Dad used to look at a sum he had already worked out on the back of the gas bill and was too kind to show me.

The bell rang at ten past nine. The owl lifted without a sound, the only way an owl does anything, and I stood at the rail counting under my breath while the cage rose out of the black with its iron groan. Eleven. Twelve. Then the lamps came into the yard, the men stepping out grey to the eyebrows, and I was still counting when Dafydd's hand closed on my shoulder hard enough to hurt.

'Thirteen,' I said, and nobody argued. Dad came out last, his lamp still lit, and stopped at the fence where a single pale feather had been left on the rail, turning slowly in the draught from the shaft. He picked it up and looked at me, and he smiled as though he had been expecting it there all along.