Colour tattoo of a geometric owl with a galaxy-filled body on the thigh, perched on a black angular branch.

Geometric owl with galaxy fill on thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A faceted owl with red eyes sits centred on the thigh, its feathers built from angular panels in browns, greys and yellows. The body is filled with a night sky of blue and purple nebula tones and small white stars, and the owl perches on a black branch drawn with thin white linework. Solid black edging outlines the owl and branch, and the colour fades to dark tones at the lower edge.

Geometric Thigh Owl Galaxy Star Branch Night sky Nebula Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had been watching me copy the sky for three nights before Master Eudemos noticed I was not sleeping. He found me on the flat roof of the library at Alexandria, my ink drying on a wax tablet, the lamp guttering beside a bowl of cold lentils. "You will go blind," he said, and then he sat down beside me on the warm stone and asked what I was drawing.

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It was the bird, of course. It perched on the dead branch of the olive tree the gardeners kept meaning to cut, and its feathers were not feathers so much as flat panels of brown and ochre, fitted together like broken pottery. Where the panels parted, the night showed through. Small white stars pricked the gaps, and a smear of violet cloud drifted down its breast. Its eyes were the red of lamp-oil held up to the light. I had drawn its chest as a map, with lines joining the stars the way the old charts join them, and I was proud of it until Eudemos pointed at the tablet and laughed quietly.

"Look again," he said. "That was Orion's belt on the first night. Last night it was higher, and the bird had shifted along the branch." I looked, and he was right. The bird was not carrying the sky on its breast. It was carrying the hour, and the sky had been turning under it while I was too busy to notice the difference.

At first light the owl opened its wings and dropped off the branch without a sound. The thin white lines it had been perched on stayed where they were, hanging in the grey air like a mark someone had drawn and forgotten to rub out. I wrote the date beneath my map, then the bird's name as the porters called it, then the word for dawn, and left the lamp burning for no one.