Black and grey dotwork owl tattoos on the tops of both feet, with a barn owl with a heart-shaped face on the left foot and a round-eyed owl on the right.

Matching owl tattoos on the tops of feet

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two owl faces sit within shield-shaped outlines, one on each foot, and the left owl has a heart-shaped facial disc while the right has rounder eyes and a more feathered face. The shading is built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines, with soft tonal gradients around the eyes and facial discs. The image is in greyscale with a plain grey background, and both tattoos are shown straight on and evenly lit.

Dotwork Other Owl Barn owl Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's soft as a biscuit. Not rot, that's only the owls. Two of them roost up in the lamp room now, in the gap where the glass cracked the winter the Mary Ann went onto the Skerries. Keeper Abel Tranter had no use for birds and said so, right up until the white one landed on his lamp shade and wouldn't be shifted.

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The white one had a face like a heart turned upside down, and it watched the sea the way Abel's wife had watched the harbour road every night for eleven years. The second owl came later, in the autumn gales, round-eyed and fluffed out like a feather duster, and it took to sitting on the rail where Abel polished the brass. He called it Sunday, because it came when he had nothing to do. It never once looked at the water. It looked at him.

Then came the night the oil ran low and the wick guttered at half past two. Abel climbed the stair with a hurricane lamp in one hand and his heart in his mouth, and found both owls already at the glass, wings beating the sea-wind back out through the crack so the flame could stand upright. Heart kept the draught off the wick. Sunday sat on Abel's shoulder and refused to move until his boots found the rungs.

Tranter had the light burning by dawn, and the Mary Ann's crew saw it from the Skerries, seven men in one boat, and rowed for it. Nobody wrote the night down. Abel only ever said the owls kept the light, the light kept the sea honest, and the two of them had sorted out between them which was the watching and which was the looking. Mind the rail now. Mind the rail.