Black and grey dotwork design of an owl with mandala-style wings spread wide, perched on a faceted diamond.

Dotwork owl with mandala wings on a diamond

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a stylised owl with wings spread wide, the feathers built from layered petal-like shapes. The owl's body and wings are shaded with fine stippled dots, and its eyes are outlined in bold black linework. Below, a faceted diamond sits on a grid of triangular lines, also shaded with dots, against a sepia paper background.

Dotwork Geometric Owl Diamond Mandala Wing Feather Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came down the chimney flue every night the wind was in the east, and every night Ada Wrench swept up what it left on the cutting bench: a rust-coloured feather, a wet pellet of mouse bone, once a sliver of quartz no larger than a barley grain. Ada had worked the wheel at Scarrow Point for thirty-one years and had never once seen the bird come or go. She knew it only by its leavings and the particular cold it brought into the shed.

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The stone arrived in February, when the sea wouldn't let the boat near. It was a brown diamond, dull as pond glass, and pocked all over with tiny craters like the underside of a crumpet. Harrow, who sold to jewellers in Newcastle, wanted it polished flat and sent on by Friday. Ada set it in the dop wax, lowered it to the wheel, and stopped, because the owl was sitting on the beam above her, watching the stone with its head turned all the way round.

'Those pits are where the light gets in,' she told it, feeling foolish. The owl blinked, unhurried, and let a single feather fall across the bench. Ada took the hint. She cut the facets as the old books taught, but instead of polishing the pits away she went over each one with a needle point, stippling the stone darker around them until the diamond seemed to hold a sky of small dark spots, each catching a pinprick of lamplight.

Harrow came for it on Friday and turned it under his loupe for a long time. 'Who did the shading?' he asked. Ada said the owl had. He laughed, then didn't, because when he tilted the stone towards the window, something above the bench shifted its wings, and the shadows of the feathers slid across his hands.