Colour tattoo of a flying owl with spread wings on the neck behind the ear, shaded in browns and tans with yellow eyes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying owl tattoo behind the ear

Traditional · Neck · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of a small owl in flight with both wings spread, shown in profile and turned towards the viewer. The owl is outlined in black with shaded feather texture in browns, tans and orange, and its large eyes are yellow with dark centres. The tattoo sits on skin behind an ear, with the photo cropped close around the design.

Traditional Neck Owl Bird Wing Feather Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came in through the loading bay the morning the proving cabinet packed in, skimming low over the trays of cooling tins as if it had a shift to clock on for. Dilys swore it was a stray off the allotments. I said it was a short-eared owl and she could take it up with the field guide on the shelf. It settled on the rack above the flour bins, one wing still half open where it had clipped the door frame, and looked down at us with those amber eyes like two coins nobody had got round to spending.

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We worked in the dark part of the morning, when the streetlamps on Tanner Row still buzzed and the only other light for miles was ours. Three hundred cobs before the Co-op van, Dilys liked to say, though nobody had seen a milk float on Tanner Row since the eighties. I kneaded and she scored, and the owl watched us both with the patience of something that had seen a great many bakers come and go. Every so often it shifted its weight and a loose feather drifted down onto the cooling racks, and Dilys brushed it off with the back of her hand and said the health inspector would have her guts for garters.

When the sky over the car park turned the colour of a well-proved crust, the owl lifted off without a sound, cut through the grey strip of light at the bay door, and was gone over the roofs. Dilys wiped her hands on her apron and said the cabinet would want a new thermostat by Friday. I left the bay door open a crack anyway. The next morning there was a single rust-brown feather lying on the flour bin, soft as the inside of a cob, and I kept it in my apron pocket all day.