Colourful barn owl tattoo in a loose watercolour style, with the words It's only forever not long at all in black script, on a limb.

Barn owl with lyric lettering on a limb

Other · Mixed · Photo

A barn owl with a heart-shaped face sits above black script reading

Other Owl Barn owl Lettering Quote Wing Splatter

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came down the pass the winter the snow stopped falling on the Hollin side, and nobody in Scar Gate liked it. It sat on the byre roof of the widow Teale and screamed at the moon like a woman being robbed. Her son Abel went up with a lantern to shift it and came back with feathers caught in his coat and a look on his face that his mother did not ask about.

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The owl wanted salt. Old Mab, who kept the lower inn, said so. Every creature that lived above the tree line wanted something from the valley folk, and the owl's price was a lamb's bone boiled clean, or a song sung to it on the pass road after dark. Abel tried the bone first. The owl took it and dropped it in the beck. So he tried the song, which he could not carry, and sang off-key until the rocks answered him with a laugh.

On the third night the mist came down thick as wool, and the carrier from Kendal did not come through. Abel took the lantern up again. He found the cart on its side, the carrier pinned under a wheel, and the owl sitting on the shaft with its eyes like two pale coins. It looked at him for a long while. Then it lifted, and the mist opened in front of it like a door, and Abel followed the white flash of its wings down to the road, where the carrier's mule stood waiting with its ears up.

They buried the carrier in spring. Nobody asked the owl for anything again. Abel says the bird still sits on the Teale roof, and that when the mist comes down you can hear it counting the lamps in the valley, one by one, to make sure every one is still lit.