Flash sheet of nine stylised owl line drawings in olive gold ink on a white background, with patterned feathers and some owls perched on branches.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nine owl designs on a flash sheet

Colour · Flash

A sheet of nine owl designs drawn in gold or olive single-colour linework on white. The owls vary in pose and size, some perched on branches or sprigs of leaves, and most have intricate feather patterns of scallops, chevrons and dotted textures. The lines are fine and even, and the layout is a loose grid of separate motifs with no shading.

Owl Feather Branch Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Harrowgate Junction kept nine owls in the signal box loft, one for every platform and branch line, and he fed them mice from the goods yard in exchange for their watching. Each owl had its own perch and its own way of looking. The tallest sat with its feathers laid in neat scallops, and it was the first to wake when a train was late. The one with the chevron breast perched on a sprig of ivy and said nothing at all, which the men found more unsettling than any hooting.

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One November a boy called Tomas Elwood came up the steps with a lamp and a ticket stub he had found in his grandfather's coat. He wanted the last train to Seaford Mill, which had not run since before the war. The stationmaster told him the timetable was kept by the owls, not by the company, and that he would have to ask the one on the low branch, because that one had carried the last passengers off the line.

Tomas asked it politely. The owl turned its gold-rimmed eyes on him for a long while, then opened its wing so the feathers fanned out like a pleated skirt. Under the feathers was a small brass bell and a folded slip of paper. The slip said Platform Four, three minutes, and the date was tomorrow's. Tomas put the bell in his pocket and went down to wait in the cold, and at the stroke of the hour the far lamps came on, slowly, one by one, along a track that had been dark all his life.