Colourful watercolour-style owl tattoo with orange, blue and green feathers on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Colourful owl on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A large owl faces forward, with wide round eyes, orange and red feathers on the wings and head, and a patchwork of blue, green and purple feathers on its chest. Bold black linework outlines the shapes, while soft washes of colour bleed beyond the edges. The owl is centred on the upper back, with a lotus-style tattoo and a feather outline visible at the left and part of a coloured sleeve at the right.

Back Owl Feather Lotus Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl was meant to be brown. Mr Pryce had drawn it in tawny ink on the cartoon, a plain bird for a plain window in the back room of the Lantern Street workshop, and he had pinned it to the light table with four brass tacks before he went home to his tea. I was eleven weeks into my apprenticeship and had been told to trace, not to think.

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So I traced it, and then, because the afternoon was long and the rain had come sideways off the moor, I took the wash brushes down. I had only meant to test the paper. Yellow went into the wings, a red bled in from the edge, and when I laid a blue wash across the breast it spread into the paper's grain like weather over a hill, past every line Mr Pryce had drawn. By the time the lamp needed lighting the owl had stopped being brown and looked, to my eye, as if dusk itself had painted it.

He came in at seven, saw the paper, and said nothing for so long I began to pack my brushes. Then he took off his coat, pulled up a stool and sat with his spectacles on the end of his nose. 'Bold lines,' he said at last, 'and the colour won't stay where it's told. In glass that's a fault. In a bird it might be the whole point.' He did not tell me to throw it away.

The window went into the chapel that spring with a grey owl's cousin in the lower lights, and nobody in the parish has ever asked why the top panel burns orange at sunrise. The cartoon hangs above my bench now, the wash still stopping just short of the black. Mr Pryce's four tacks are still in the corners. I left them there.