Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of an owl face with ornate patterned feathers and swirling tendrils on the thigh.

Ornate owl and swirls on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold owl face with large round eyes sits within a dense pattern of feathers and geometric shapes, drawn with dark outlines. Shading is smooth in the beak and feathers, and the palette uses teal, blue, purple, orange, red and yellow. Black swirling tendrils with dot accents extend across the lower part of the thigh, and the crop shows the tattoo filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had warned me that an owl was a poor choice for a margin, because owls look out of the page and the eye goes straight to them. He was right, and I drew it anyway, in the lower corner of the psalter where the vellum had been scraped thin by three generations of thumbs. The abbot had asked for a plain capital D. I gave him a D with a bird's head pushed into its belly, feathers fanned out in rings like the lids of a clock.

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Night work was how the scriptorium kept its light. We had one candle per desk and a rule about trimming wicks, and I broke it most nights, leaning so close to the parchment that the smoke made my eyes run. The owl's eyes took me four evenings. Pupils first, black as ink, then the whites left bare so that a reader would feel something watching from the page. The feathers I built from small teeth of red and ochre, each one a little door I could step through when the bell for matins had gone and the others were asleep.

Brother Anselm found it on a Thursday and said nothing for so long I thought he meant to scrape it out. Instead he took the pen from my hand, dipped it in the blue we had ground from lapis and too much honey, and set a single dot beside the beak where the swirling tendrils of the border curled away towards the edge. "Now it has a listener," he said, and went back down to the kitchen to see about the soup.

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