Two matching shaded black and grey owl tattoos perched on branches, one on each forearm, with the wearers' hands clasped at the bottom of the frame.

Matching owls on two forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show near-identical owl tattoos, each with large round eyes, feathered ear tufts and a small beak, perched on a thin branch. The owls are rendered with soft grey shading and fine detail in the feathers and eyes, in black ink and greys only. The owls sit centrally on each forearm against a plain skin background, with a paved path and a teal bag visible at the bottom of the frame.

Forearm Owl Branch Bird Eye Feather Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Somewhere past the last petrol station the road stopped pretending to be straight, and that was when the owls started keeping an eye on us. My sister Dani had the atlas open across her knees and a flask of tea going cold between her boots. I kept the headlights on the white line and said nothing about the fuel gauge, which had been lying to me since Winnemucca.

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The juniper stood alone by the verge, bare as a coat hanger, and on one thin limb sat two little owls. They were round-eyed and perfectly still, watching the car come up the road as if we were late for something important. Dani laughed and said they looked like a pair of retired headmasters. I pulled onto the gravel without quite deciding to, and we sat with the engine ticking while the dust settled around us like sifted flour.

When she finally wound the window down, the desert was so quiet I could hear the cooling metal. "They're not going anywhere," she said. "Neither are we, apparently." Out past the fence a coyote barked once and thought better of it. We talked about the summer we'd planned to drive to the coast and never did, about our mother's habit of counting owls as a sign of luck, and about how neither of us had ever believed a word of it.

At first light the owls were gone. The branch was empty except for a little grey feather caught in a crack of bark. Dani pocketed it without a word, and when she turned the key the engine caught on the first try. Somewhere behind us, I'd like to think, two small shapes lifted off together, and we drove on with the sun rising at our backs and the feather riding on the dashboard between us.