Hand-drawn tattoo flash design of a barn owl wearing a pendant, with a banner reading No Power Over Me, shaded in pen and blue and orange watercolour wash.

Barn owl with banner reading No Power Over Me

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A white barn owl with blue eyes perches beside a banner that reads NO POWER OVER ME, with a crescent-shaped pendant hanging from a cord around its neck. The owl is drawn in fine pen linework with soft blue and orange watercolour washes on its wing and body, while the banner uses dense hatched pen shading. The composition is a tall vertical layout on a plain white background.

Lettering Owl Barn owl Banner Pendant Necklace Bird Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk from the company office has chalked the new shift numbers on the lamp-room door again, and you are the only one who does not look up from the wick you are trimming. Ida Pryce, two stalls down, says the owl on the old winding gear has been watching you all week. Barn owls do that, her father used to say. They sit perfectly still until the thing they want is careless enough to walk past.

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You know what the men want you to sign. Forty shillings a week and a promise that the pit will not close before spring, written on paper that smells of the office fire. Your grandmother's crescent, a bit of silver worn thin as a fingernail, hangs on its cord under your collar. She wore it down the shaft for thirty years and came up each time with coal dust in the creases of her knuckles and nothing owed to anyone.

On Thursday the clerk waits at the gate with his pen uncapped. You walk past him with the cord wound twice round your fist, and in the yard the owl drops off the headgear without a sound, pale as a sheet on the coal dust, and rides the wind over the spoil heaps toward the dark fields. Nobody in the village will say what happened next. The clerk writes something down anyway.

That evening you find a single white feather caught in the hinge of your locker. You tuck it into your tin beside your grandmother's letters, shut the lid, and go back to your wicks. The shift bell rings. Nobody has asked you twice.