Black ink drawing of a tattoo design showing the Deathly Hallows triangle, a flying owl, a stag head and a banner reading death is but the next great adventure.

Deathly Hallows with owl and stag

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on paper of a tattoo design centred on the Deathly Hallows triangle, circle and vertical line. An owl in flight sits on the left, a stag head faces the upper right, and a snake-like shape wraps above a banner with the words death is but the next great adventure. The linework is fine and uniform with hatched shading on the owl's wings, and the composition is spread across a plain grey page.

Deathly hallows Owl Stag Snake Banner Triangle Circle Lightning bolt Quote Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came aboard off the Scillies with a letter tied to her leg and no name on it, which was the first wrong thing about that crossing. Captain Penhallow read it on the foredeck, folded it into his coat and said nothing for an hour. Then he went below and came back with three things from the bottom of his sea chest: a hazel wand snapped at one end, a stone worn clean through with a hole, and a silver ring he had never once worn.

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The stone was the one he had found on the shingle at Tresco when he was nine. His mother told him a thing with a hole in it could see both sides of the sea, so he had carried it in his pocket ever since. That night a grey snake came up the rigging, no longer than a boathook, and coiled round the mainmast as though it had been invited. The cook swore it had come out of the hold. Penhallow only tossed it a herring and told it to mind the bilge.

Near dawn the stag stood on the starboard bow, out on open water where no reef should be, antlers furred with weed. It looked at him the way his old dog used to, patient and a little sorry for the delay. He understood then what the letter meant, though it had only held a bearing in a hand he did not know. He took the wheel himself, and the owl flew ahead of us into the first grey light, wings spread wide over the swell.

At noon the mist lifted from the three rocks off the point, one with a hole through it, one split by a straight black line, one with a ring of white foam about its crown. Penhallow stepped ashore, put the stone back in his pocket and told me the next great adventure was only the old one with the lamps lit. He never said what he meant. I have thought about it every time I have sailed past those rocks since.