Flying owl with spread wings

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing owl with wings fully spread and talons extended, drawn in pencil on a white background. The feathers are built up with fine hatching and soft shading, with dark bands across the flight feathers and a textured, scalloped pattern on the wing coverts. The composition is symmetrical and centred, with the tail fanning out below the body.

Owl Bird Wing Feather Talon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the second week out of Falmouth the rats had taken the bread room, and Cook Ansel Pryce had the look of a man who'd rather be hanged than eat another biscuit with a hole in it. I knew a bird-keeper in Penzance who owed me a favour, and three days later a crate came aboard with a barn owl inside, pale as a communion wafer and furious about it.

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We named her Mrs Tregear after the landlady whose boarding house had taken my last shore money. She lived on a perch lashed above the flour sacks, and at dusk she would open her wings across the rafters like a pair of grey sails, so the men going down to the mess stopped on the ladder to look. Nobody cared for the sight at first. Then they cared a great deal, because the rats went quiet and then went elsewhere.

Pryce took to feeding her himself, scraps of salt pork cut fine, and he would talk to her in Cornish when he thought nobody heard. I heard. On the night the wind came round to the south-west and the galley lamp swung on its hook, he came up on deck with the bird under his coat and asked me to hold the lamp steady while he worked the hatch. Mrs Tregear went over the rail in one long pale stroke and didn't look back.

We found the bread room clear by morning. Pryce never said what he had done with her, and I never asked, but for a week every biscuit on the table was perfect, and each night at the change of the watch I looked up at the rafters and saw nothing there but the swinging lamp and the dark.