Neo-traditional colour tattoo of an owl with blossoms and clover across an upper arm and shoulder.

Colourful owl and blossoms on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large owl with big stylised eyes and a bright orange beak sits at the centre of the design, with its feathers shaded in blue, purple and orange. Pink and teal flowers, small clover leaves and curling scrollwork fill the background and surround the bird. Bold dark outlines and saturated colour run across the whole piece, which wraps around the upper arm and shoulder.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Owl Bird Flower Blossom Clover Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, don't reach for the lamp yet, Jamie, the owl won't come till the boats are in. Listen. There was an owl who lived in the rigging at Scarlow Quay, with eyes as big as herring tins and green as the weed under the slip. Every night she sat on the cleat by the wheelhouse and watched the fleet go out past the breakwater, and every night she counted them back in. Eleven boats, eleven lamps. That was her whole job and she took it serious.

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One November the Mary Ellen went out with eleven men aboard and came back with ten. Nobody in Scarlow could tell you where the eleventh had gone. The skipper's wife took to walking the quay in her Sunday coat, and the gulls quarrelled over the fish heads, and the owl, who had never once been asked to do anything but count, flew out over the black water with her orange beak pointed at the Hebrides. She did not come back that night.

Now here's the part your grandmother never told you, because she didn't know it. Come morning, the Mary Ellen was tied up at the wrong end of the harbour, and in the bilge lay a pink scrap of cloth and a clover leaf pressed flat as a coin. The owl was asleep on the bowsprit with a fish in her talons the size of your forearm. She'd found the lad who had gone over the side, hauled him onto the sandbar with her own weight and the stubbornness of a bird who will not be out-counted. Eleven. Eleven again.

So when you hear the boats coming, and you will, you count them with her. That's all there is to it. Now go to bed, and mind the lamp.