Flash design of a cartoon owl in a red jacket and blue bow tie, framed by two shaded scroll banners carrying script lettering, with no body placement shown.

Cartoon owl with script banners

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A cartoon owl with a fluffy brown body, green eyes, a red jacket, a blue bow tie and orange feet stands at the centre of the design. Two black-outlined scroll banners with grey shading carry looping script text above and below the owl, set on a sepia, mottled background. The linework is bold and even, with flat colour on the owl and monochrome shading on the banners.

Traditional Lettering Owl Banner Script Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair in, mind the cat, because the stove's near out and I'll not be getting up for coal once I've started. Winter on this farm is long, and my grandfather's owl was the only thing that didn't complain about it. He was a little brown fellow with a bow tie the blue of a jay's wing, and he sat on the byre rail every night in January, puffed up like a loaf, singing the same three things over and over.

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He'd sing about the moona, which was the big white thing that hung over the top field and made the frost go silver. Then he'd sing about the juna, though none of us had ever seen one, and Grandad swore it was a month where the hay smelled of honey. Then he'd lift his wings and sing about the springa, when the ewes lambed and the lane turned to mud, and every one of us would stamp our boots and laugh at him, because nobody could make a song out of mud like that owl.

The winter the snow shut the road to the market, the owl stopped singing. Three days he sat silent on the rail, and Grandad went out with a lantern and found him frozen to the gatepost, his orange feet tucked under him. Grandad carried him in against his chest, set him by the range, and rubbed his feathers warm with a flannel until a single croak came out, and then, bless him, the whole song, moona and juna and springa, in a rasp like a rusty hinge.

Grandad never did learn the words, mind, so he just hummed the springa and kept the stove going. Now, who's for the last of the cocoa?