Colour tattoo of a cluster of cartoon owls on a person's upper back, set against a blue watercolour wash with a grey spiral above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cluster of cartoon owls on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A cluster of stylised cartoon owls with sleepy and wide eyes sits in the centre of the upper back, with black swirling lines beneath them. The owls are shaded in orange, yellow, pink and blue, and a soft blue wash sits behind them, with a faint grey spiral above. The composition is centred on the spine and the image is taken straight on.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owls had been roosting in the eaves of the customs hut at Sallow Ford longer than anyone had bothered to count them. Dimitri called them the night shift. Five of them, sometimes six, blinked down at the lorries queuing under the sodium lamp, and they were never once awake when the paperwork needed checking.

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I came to the post in October, after my aunt's stamp book went into the river with her. The first week I kept my eyes on the water and my hands on the ledger, and the owls kept theirs half shut. Dimitri said that was how you knew they were listening. He had a rule: you never ask an owl for a name. You wait for it to offer one.

On the ninth night a man crossed the footbridge with a child asleep on his shoulder and no sheet of paper at all. I reached for the telephone. The smallest owl, the one with the pale pink face and round, astonished eyes, dropped a single grey feather onto my blotter, dusted at the tip with blue. I looked up and the whole cluster had gone wide-eyed at once, every one of them staring past me at the bridge.

I stamped nothing that night. I wrote the time, the weather and the word 'passed' in pencil, and when I looked up again the owls had shut their eyes, as if I had finally asked the right question.

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