Black and grey tattoo of an owl perched on a gnarled bare tree with a nest of owlets, across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and bare tree on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A barn owl with small yellow eyes sits on a twisted, leafless branch, with a nest containing two owlets lower down the trunk. The owl and tree are rendered in soft grey shading with fine hatching on the bark, and a faint pink flush of skin surrounds the design. The composition runs diagonally from the shoulder blade down the upper back.

Realism Back Shoulder Owl Tree Branch Bare tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smells of floor polish and warm squash, and somebody has pinned the Year Eleven photograph to the noticeboard with a drawing pin that has rusted through. Mr Pryce, who taught you biology and never once learned your name, is working the room with a paper plate of vol-au-vents. You find Dani by the urn. She still holds her elbows close, as if the world might try to take her coat.

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"Do you remember the oak?" she says. "Behind the bike sheds. They felled it the summer after we left."

You do remember. Every dinner break you climbed it, and the highest fork was where the two of you hid notes that nobody ever answered. By then the tree was dead, grey and bare, but it held the owls. Barn owls nested in a hollow in the trunk, and on the last afternoon of term you saw two pale faces poke out and watch you like a pair of tired examiners.

"The council sawed off a branch for the science block," Dani says, "and Pryce kept the nest in a biscuit tin. Two owlets, dried to nothing, in his cupboard for thirty years."

Pryce wanders over, remembers you instantly, which is worse. "Eleven of you wrote essays about that tree," he says. "Nobody wrote about the owls." You leave by the side gate as the floodlights of the new sports pitch flicker on. Past the fence, a barn owl lifts from a post with no sound at all, and you realise you have been holding your breath the whole evening.