Black and grey blackwork owl tattoo with ornamental patterns on an upper arm, shown during application by a gloved tattooist using a machine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate owl tattoo being worked on

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A gloved tattooist works with a tattoo machine on a large owl design with a front-facing face, wide eyes and ornate patterned feathers. The linework is fine and dense, with solid black areas and detailed filler in the wings and chest. The image is black and white, and the composition shows the tattooist's hands, the machine and the freshly worked skin.

Blackwork Upper arm Owl Feather Ornament Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came back to the bell-cote the week the snow shut the top road, and I counted its calls from the toll hut the way my mother counted sheep through the gate. Four hoots meant the wind was backing round to the east. Two meant nothing but a mouse. Nobody else in the valley listened for it any more.

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On the ninth night a lorry's headlamps came up from the drifts below, then went out. Tomas Beddoe had taken the old drovers' cut because his map said it was shorter, and the map knew nothing about the cornice above the fourth bend. I went out with the storm lamp and saw only white. Then the owl called, long and low, from somewhere to my left, and I walked towards it until the lamp caught the corner of his wing mirror.

Afterwards he asked how I had found him. I told him the truth, which was that I had not found him, the owl had. He laughed until he saw I was not joking, then looked up at the bell-cote with the face of a man rethinking his whole education. He asked if he could draw it. I said the owl would never sit still for that, and he said that was fine, he had a steady hand and a good memory for feathers.

In April a postcard came with the pass printed on the front. Inside was a small ink owl with eyes like two lamps, every feather worked into loops and swirls, the way frost feathers a windscreen overnight. I pinned it beside the ledger where I log the weather. Under it I wrote what the owl had told us that winter: four hoots, wind backing east, come in, traveller.