Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a cartoon owl with orange eyes on a branch with pink cherry blossoms, across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon owl and cherry blossom on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cartoon owl with large blue-ringed orange eyes and a purple and lilac body perches on a dark grey branch. Pink cherry blossom flowers and buds are tattooed across the shoulder and upper back, with soft shading and blended colour on the petals. The composition wraps the design around the shoulder blade, with the owl placed prominently on the right side of the image.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Back Owl Cherry blossom Branch Petal Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came to the eighteenth floor of Halewood House in March, the same week the cherry tree in the car park decided to flower early. You found it on the balcony rail of flat 18C, round-eyed and furious, one wing folded wrong. Nobody on the estate had ever seen an owl that close, and the lad from fourteen swore it was a baby one that had fallen out of the trees by the canal.

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Mrs Okafor from nine said owls were bad luck, and Mr Pryce from the lift repair crew said they were just pigeons with ambition. You fetched a shoebox, a tea towel and the tin of Bourbons you kept for emergencies, and you sat with it on the kitchen floor while the blossom outside the window went from pink to paper and back again. The owl stared at the kettle as if it had personally offended it.

By April the wing had knitted. You carried the shoebox up to the roof on a Sunday, past the washing lines, and it opened its wings above the grey parapet and dropped like a glove off a shelf, then caught itself on a thermal over the car park. Petals came off the cherry in the wind and spun up around it, and for a moment the whole estate looked like it had been painted by someone who had got carried away.

You went back down in the lift, which smelled of Mr Pryce's solder. When you reached the eighteenth floor, a single pink petal had caught on the balcony rail, and you left it there.