Black and grey geometric owl tattoo with feather-like panels and scroll detail across the inside of a forearm.

Geometric owl on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised owl face is drawn with bold black outlines, with its eyes set within layered triangular and diamond shapes. Below, angular feather panels are filled with fine parallel lines, dotted detail and ornamental scrolls. The tattoo is shown in greyscale against a wooden floor, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's been at the pie again. I'll tell it the way my father told it, while Mrs Pryce is still pouring. The owl in the clock tower at Carrow Bridge was carved from one board of oak by a joiner who could not sleep, and he measured every feather with a set square, so each one came out straight as a railway line. Folk said he never finished it, because the eyes were nested triangles that went on inward like the rings of a felled tree, and nobody could say where the centre was.

Keep reading

Idris Vane kept the church clock that winter. He swore the owl turned its head when the bell struck the hour, and he took to climbing up with a lamp and a tin of oil just to see the wooden eyes look at the flame instead of at him. The tannery had shut, the men had gone to the coast, and Idris talked to the owl about them the way you'd talk to a dog that never answered back.

On a Tuesday in February the boys who went up for the milk money found the clock stopped at a quarter past three. Idris was nowhere on the stair. Pinned beneath the owl's talon was a scrap of paper with pencilled words: Count the feathers, they are all still there. They counted. Four hundred and twelve, every diamond whole, every scroll unbroken, and not one of them had been moved.

So that is why you will never see the owl from the road, only from the bridge, looking down at the water. If you ever go up that stair, bring a lamp, and don't count the feathers yourself. Let the owl do it. It has been at it since 1953 and it is not finished yet.

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