Pen and ink drawing of four owls stacked one above another in a vertical column, shown beside a black gel pen on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four stacked owls in ink

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of four owls perched one on top of another in a tall column, each with large round eyes and feathered bodies. The linework uses fine strokes and dense hatching to build feathers and shadow, with no colour. The drawing sits on plain white paper, with a black gel pen laid to the right for scale.

Owl Bird Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had counted the owls on the chapel roof every evening since the Brindley pit closed, and every evening there were fewer. This evening there were four, one more than she expected and about three too many for the gutter. They had stacked themselves on the coping of the wall by the lych gate, the biggest at the top and the smallest wedged underneath, like crockery someone had put away in a hurry.

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"They're after the bread," said her grandson Tom, who was nine and believed everything on the high ground belonged to somebody with a reason. "Look, they're watching the back door."

She didn't look. She had watched the back door of the Miners' Welfare for thirty-one years, waiting for men who did not come out until the lamps were lit, and she knew the owls were not watching it. They were watching the lane, the way the women had watched it, all four heads turned the same way.

Down the hill a cage bell rang twice, the old signal, and the lane filled with the first of the night shift walking up, tin cans knocking at their hips. The top owl turned its round face to follow them. Then the four of them lifted off the wall one after another, wheeled once over the slag heap, and settled back with their wings folded and their eyes half shut, as though the job was done.

Tom ran to the gate. Mrs Hollis stayed where she was with the bread in her apron and waited, counting the men as they came up the lane, and for once she got the number right.