Grey tattoo of a Celtic knotwork owl with bright green eyes and a crescent moon above it, on the forearm.

Celtic knot owl and crescent moon on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl sits centre frame, its body and wings filled with interwoven Celtic knotwork and its face framed by a knotted brow. A pale crescent moon with soft shading floats above its head. The work is mostly black and grey with bold outlines and smooth shading, and the owl's eyes are the only colour, a bright green.

Forearm Owl Crescent moon Moon Celtic knot Knotwork Eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the ward went quiet in the way Ailsa had learned to distrust. The monitor in bed six had stopped its chirp, the drip in bay two had finished its slow ticking, and the only noise was the kettle in the sluice, which she had forgotten to switch on. She stood at the station with the obs chart in one hand and looked out through the window at the car park, where a single security lamp made a pale island of tarmac.

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Mr Hallett had asked for the window open an inch, and she had refused twice because the rules were the rules. Now she went back down the corridor and eased the catch, because nobody was watching and the air smelled of wet hedges and diesel. On the lamp post sat an owl. It was not doing anything an owl was supposed to do. It simply looked at the ward with eyes as green as the bottle glass on her grandmother's windowsill, its feathers laid out in the tight over-and-under weave her grandmother had stitched onto every tea towel in the house, a knot with no end.

"He's counting," Mr Hallett said from his pillow, though she had not known he was awake. "They come down to count the ones on the list."

Ailsa wrote 03:20 on the chart and under it, Patient settled. She checked his pulse, which was steady, and his saturation, which was fine, and she told herself the old men in this place said all sorts when the lights went down. When she looked up again the lamp post was bare and a thin moon hung over the multistorey like a paring from a lemon. The monitor in bed six began its chirp again, regular as breathing, and she let out a breath she had not realised she was holding.