Black ink drawing of a barn owl perched on a stippled skull within a diamond frame, a dotwork and blackwork tattoo design shown on tracing paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Barn owl on a skull tattoo design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a barn owl perched on a human skull, with feathers and a strand of beads across the skull's crown. The owl is rendered in fine linework with shaded feathers, while the skull and background use dense stippling and solid black areas. The design is set inside a black diamond shape on pale translucent paper, with no colour and no body part visible.

Dotwork Blackwork Owl Barn owl Skull Feather Bead Diamond Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came to the lamp room the winter the Mary Ellen went down off the Scarr, and she never once looked at me the way the gulls did, as if I were furniture that might decide to move. I called her Ida after my mother, which my sister thought morbid, though she had never had to climb a hundred and twelve iron rungs in a south-westerly with a paraffin can in her fist.

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Ida roosted on the bracket above the clockwork, where the spare wicks were kept, and every night she went out through the broken pane and came back before the second turn of the light with something small and furred. I found the skull on the Kettle Ledge at low water in March, bleached the colour of old piano keys, with a string of blue glass beads caught in the crown where some fisherman's wife must have hung it for luck. I carried it up in a flour sack. Ida landed on it before I had the sack untied.

The logbook says nothing of any of that. It records wind force, visibility, the boats that passed at dawn and the number of times I wound the weights. It does not say that I took to sitting with the two of them after the watch, the owl folded on the skull like a clerk on a stack of papers, both of them watching the black water go silver under the beam.

When the relief boat came in April, the new keeper asked what I wanted done with the bird. I told him she was not mine to give. On my last evening I opened the broken pane, and Ida went out over the Kettle Ledge without looking back. When I went down the rungs for the last time the skull was still on the bracket, beads catching the light, and I left it there for whoever climbs up next.