Black and grey barn owl tattoo with falling raindrops and stippled shading, placed on the forearm.

Barn owl under rain on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A barn owl stands on a dotted patch of ground beneath a sky of teardrop-shaped raindrops, with a small star beside its feet. The heart-shaped face and wings are built from fine outlines, with dot stippling on the head and hatched strokes across the body and wing. The tattoo is entirely black and grey on pale skin, set against a plain dark top.

Dotwork Forearm Owl Barn owl Raindrop Rain Star Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had not stopped in nine days, and the millers of Hallow Ford had begun to bring their grain indoors and sleep beside it. Old Brannoc said the sky was only weeping for a bad harvest, but his granddaughter Teodra had seen the owl on the dyke post at dusk and knew the weather was not theirs to pity.

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The barn owl came down from the rafters of the tithe house on the tenth night, pale as a loaf and quiet as a held breath. It walked the wet ground between the sheep pens, lifting each foot as if the mud were hot, and where it stopped the dots of rain on the grass went still, as if listening. Teodra followed it with a lamp she did not light. At the edge of the dry hill it turned its heart-shaped face towards her and waited, and she understood that it was asking her to choose the right hill.

She chose the one with the single star pricked above it, the hill her mother had called the sleeping dog. They dug there with their hands until the clay gave up a stone bowl older than any name in the valley. The owl stood over it and shook each wing in turn, and the rain that fell after was thin and warm and smelled of bread.

In spring the millers still complained of the wet, but Teodra kept the bowl on the sill of the tithe house and never told them that the owl had only ever asked her to look where the ground was dry.