Colour tattoo of a barn owl perched on a stack of coloured books on the upper arm, with the shoulder and a dark vest top visible.

Barn owl perched on a stack of books

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A barn owl with a pale heart-shaped face and detailed feather shading sits on top of a tall stack of books. The books are drawn with visible spines and page edges in red, green, blue, purple and yellow. The tattoo runs down the upper arm from the shoulder, with a plain backdrop and a dark vest top at the edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The returns trolley is always heaviest after the autumn fair, and this year it was the owl who got there first. You find her on the top shelf of the tithe barn at dusk, pale face turned towards the door, the overdue books beneath her climbing almost to the beam.

Keep reading

Mrs Haworth, who keeps the lending box at the forest edge, says the barn owl arrived with the wet spring and has never once been fined. She eats mice from the hayloft and sleeps on the atlases. You have been told not to move her. You have been told a great many things since you were handed the key, most of them about the damp.

So you start reading the stack aloud, one book each evening, while the owl listens with her head tilted like a clerk weighing a complaint. The third book is a green-spined almanac with a boy's name pencilled inside the cover, and a line beneath it: keep this one, the owl will mind it. You check the lending register. No one by that name has been a member for forty years.

On the last evening you lift the red-spined volume from the top of the pile. The owl shuffles, opens one wing a fraction, then settles. You slide a blank card into the pocket of the book you have just finished and set it back on the stack, exactly where it was.

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