Fresh black linework outline of a barn owl with spread wings and a beaded necklace, across the chest and side ribs.

Barn owl with spread wings and beaded necklace

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A fresh black linework outline of a barn owl with spread wings, its heart-shaped face framed by a beaded necklace with a hanging ring. Only the outlines are inked so far, with no shading or fill, and the design spans the upper chest and side of the ribcage on pale skin partly covered by white tissue. The composition runs diagonally, with one wing sweeping across the chest and the other down the side of the body.

Chest Ribs Owl Barn owl Wing Feather Bead Necklace Pendant Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barn owl had taken the top rail of the coconut shy as if she had paid for it. Tom Sayer stood below with a tin mug of cold tea and a sign board balanced on two trestles, waiting for her to decide whether the night belonged to her or to him. Her face was a pale heart in the dusk, her ruff pricked up, and round her throat hung the string of wooden beads his sister had threaded for the fair last spring, with a brass curtain ring knotted at the bottom.

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'Go on, then,' he said. 'Fill in your own outline, if you're so particular.' Mr Gorringe, who ran the fair, had commissioned the board: a barn owl with its wings opened wide across a painted sky, the sort of thing that drew farmhands and their sweethearts in from three villages. Tom had drawn it in pencil and then in ink, every feather a separate stroke, and he had not let anyone touch the colour. Paint was the easy part. The line was the hard part, and he wanted it right first.

At eleven the wind came off the flats and the owl lifted, not away from him but across, and settled on the trestle beside the board. She folded one wing down over the edge of the wet ink like a hand laid over a letter. Tom swore under his breath, then stopped. Her talons were clean on the wood, and the outline beneath her wing sat perfectly, as if she had walked the pencil marks herself.

In the morning Gorringe found the board still bare of paint, every feather true, and beside it on the trestle a single wooden bead, dropped from a string nobody claimed. Tom kept it in his waistcoat pocket and did not paint the sky.