Colour botanical tattoo on a lower leg showing a green owl with two smaller owls, a red heart, a brown swirling vine, leaves and white daisies.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green owls and daisy vine on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large green owl with patterned wings and yellow-ringed eyes sits on a curling brown vine, with two smaller owls, one on its shoulder and one on its chest, and a small red heart above. Leaves and white daisies with green stems run down the vine towards the ankle. The linework is dark and even, the fills are flat colour with little shading, and the design is arranged along the length of the leg.

Botanical Calf Owl Heart Vine Leaves Daisy Flower Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had been sitting on the lych-gate for three nights before anyone thought to count her young. Mrs Ferris counted them from the vestry window and sent word down to the Plough that the owl had brought a whole family, one on her shoulder and one tucked against her breast like a parcel that might tip. Tom Aske, who painted the inn sign and did most of the village lettering, took his brushes up the lane with a jar of green he had mixed for the gate and not yet used.

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The gate was a poor place to paint. Rain came sideways off the Quantocks, and the vine climbing the posts kept dropping leaves into the wet varnish. Tom worked anyway, one daisy at a time, while the mother owl watched him with ochre-ringed eyes as though checking his spelling. He had been told all his life that owls were bad luck. Mrs Ferris said that was only what people said about anything that could see them clearly in the dark.

On the fourth morning the mother was gone, and the two small owls sat alone on the gatepost, blinking at the sun. Tom did not like to leave them. He laid his jacket over the smaller one and carried them both down to the inn kitchen in a bread basket, where the landlady fed them scraps of cold bacon and told him to stop fussing. By evening a green-backed shape had settled on the roof ridge, and it stayed there until the owlets could fly.

Tom finished the gate in October. Mrs Ferris paid him in cider and a jar of honey, and he kept the honey on the sill above his bench, where it caught the light. When customers asked why the sign had a tiny red heart in one corner, he told them it was the mother's, left behind so the lane would know she meant to come back.