Small black line tattoo of a cartoon owl with swirled eyes and three star shapes to its upper right, on orange-toned skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon owl with stars

Black and grey · Photo

A small cartoon owl with triangular ear tufts, swirled eyes and scalloped wings is outlined in black ink, with short dash marks across its chest. Three asterisk-shaped stars sit to the upper right, and the eyes are filled with dark ink while the rest of the design is left as open outline. The tattoo is centred on the frame against orange-toned skin, with no visible body part to show where it sits.

Owl Star Eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hannah Pryce kept the lamp at the top of Shaft Nine, and every night an owl came to sit on the pulley wheel of the headframe. It had tufts like two folded corners of a letter and eyes that had gone round and swirled from watching the lamp for so long. The men called it Dafydd because it was the only thing on the hill that never went down the pit.

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In the winter of the flood, the cage stuck forty fathoms down with six men inside it. The rope creaked and the water climbed in the sump. Hannah sent the boy to fetch the banksman, but the boy came back saying the banksman had gone to the Miners' Arms and would not be fetched. The owl lifted off the wheel and dropped down the shaft, which no owl had ever done, and its pale wings flashed in the lamplight until the dark took them.

Hannah did not see what it did down there. She only saw the rope move, then stop, then move again, the cage rising by inches. At the top the owl came out first, shaking off the wet, and caught on its wing were three bright specks like frost on a gate. It settled on the wheel and blinked at her. All six men lived, and that night the three specks went up into the sky and stayed where they were put.

The pit closed in the sixties and the headframe went for scrap. Men who worked Shaft Nine still point out three stars above the hill in January and say that is where the owl left them, and it is the only thing any of them ever claimed to know for certain about where the stars came from.