Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a small owl perched on a branch, across the top of a foot.

Dotwork owl on a branch across the foot

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl sits on a thin branch with two leaves at each end, shown in black ink on the top of a foot. The owl is built from fine linework and stippled dots, with patterned scalloped wings, a mottled chest and large round eyes with dotted rings. The photograph is black and white, with the foot filling most of the frame against a plain background.

Dotwork Other Owl Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the door, because Mrs Pennock swears it has a voice and I'll not have it hearing you. The snow shut the Drovers' Rest for nine days that winter, and the only creature keeping watch on the top road was the owl in the old larch by the gate. Nobody had seen it move in forty years. It sat on its crooked branch with the two little leaves at either end, round-eyed and patient, as if it had been told to wait for someone.

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On the ninth night the innkeeper's daughter, Elspeth, went out with the lantern to check the rope we'd strung to the stable. She came back white to the lips and said the owl had turned its head to follow her, the whole way round, and then hooted once. Once. She counted the travellers still under our roof and made it eleven, when there ought to have been twelve. Her father reckoned she'd miscounted, same as he always reckoned, until a carter's boy turned up at the door with frost in his eyebrows, asking after his master's sledge.

The owl was still on the branch at dawn, its feathers stiff with rime, and its eyes had gone the colour of the sky before a thaw. Nobody in the village could say how long it had been there, only that the leaves on that branch never once turned brown. We found the carter, too, sitting in the snow beneath it with his hands tucked into his coat, alive and muttering that a grey bird had kept telling him the road was that way.

We buried nothing that spring, which is more than most winters can claim. The old larch is gone now, and the gate with it, but I've a feather in the till drawer that doesn't belong to any bird I know, and every January I leave the lamp in the window for whoever's out on the top road counting.