Gold line drawing of a geometric owl with spread wings, an arrow through its talons and rays above its head, on a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric owl with arrow and spread wings

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical owl with wings fully spread faces forward, with an arrow passing horizontally beneath its talons and short radiating rays above its head. The design uses clean, even monoline strokes with angular facets in the wings and body, and no shading. Gold lines sit against a plain black background, centred in the composition.

Geometric Fine line Owl Arrow Wing Ray Feather Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the urn boils over and Mr Abernethy starts reading the register again. Right. You all remember the owl on the bell tower of Halden Lane School, the one with its wings out like a shop sign, and the arrow that Nan Pritchard swore had been stuck through its feet since 1931. Nobody ever pulled it out. We tried. Cyril tried with a pair of pliers, and the arrow simply would not move, which is how you know a thing is meant to stay.

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The rays over its head were gold, or what we called gold, the paint the council bought off a man in Stroud. Every morning when the bell went, the light came off the lead roof in lines, the same lines, straight as a ruler. Miss Ida Coyle used to say the owl was counting us in. She could do sums in her head faster than the clock could tick, and she said an owl sees the whole field at once, every mouse and every mistake, so you had best do your homework.

Then in the summer of 1958 the arrow went missing. Someone had pulled it clean out and left the owl with nothing but a little rust on its feet. Cyril swore on his mother that it wasn't him, and I believed him, because Cyril could never keep a secret longer than a bus ride. We found the arrow a week later under the floorboards of the caretaker's hut, wrapped in a page of the register with every one of your names crossed out but one.

Which is why I am telling you this tonight. The name left uncrossed is mine, and I have waited fifty years for one of you to ask me why. So ask me, Cyril. Go on. The owl has been watching us both the whole time.