Colourful owl tattoo on the upper arm
Upper arm · Colour · Photo
A cartoon owl with large round eyes sits upright, its body filled with ornate paisley and mandala-style patterns. The bold black outlines are filled with pink, teal, orange, purple and yellow, with soft shading on the feathers and wings. Reddish swirl lines surround the design on the skin, which fills most of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The owl of Harrow Fen had been sitting on the same dead oak for longer than anyone in the village could remember, and every autumn the women of the three cottages took turns climbing up with a pot of paint to touch her up. Her feathers were patterned with the things they had seen in their lifetimes: the ribbon of the spring fair, the blue of the dye vats at the mill, the orange of the bread crust Old Mabel left out on the step. Nobody thought this strange. An owl ought to be dressed for the season.
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The year the river froze early, Ada Pell came up the oak with her brushes and found the owl's eyes had gone grey. Grey as ash, round and blank, and the feathers on her chest had lost their swirls and turned the colour of wet slate. Ada sat on the branch a long while, listening to the ice crack under the mill wheel. Then she went down, fetched every scrap of ribbon in the village, and climbed back up to tie them along the owl's wings, knotted tight so the wind would not take them.
In the morning the owl's eyes were blue again, the deep blue of the mill pond in summer, and the ribbons had gone the colours of the thaw. Ada never said she had made the difference. She only left a crust on the step each day after that, and the owl, who had seen a great deal of winter, looked down at her with an expression that was almost amused.
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