Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a round-eyed owl perched on a branch with pink blossom, placed on the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and blossom branch on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style owl with large orange and yellow eyes sits on a branch in front of a teal circle, with its feet gripping the twig. Pink five-petalled blossom and green leaves frame the owl on both sides, and the scalloped orange feathers on its chest are shaded with darker tones. Bold black outlines and saturated colour dominate, with the design sitting across the shoulder and upper arm.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Owl Cherry blossom Branch Leaves Eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nessa Farrow noticed the owl on the Tuesday, when she came out with the washing basket and found it sitting on the lowest branch of the old cherry, looking at her as though she were late. Its eyes were the colour of marmalade held up to a window. Behind the wash-house the blossom had come out all at once, pink as a boiled sweet, and the owl seemed to think it had arranged the whole thing.

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Her father had planted that cherry the spring she was born, and he had talked to it the way other men talked to dogs. After he died the garden went to nettles and bindweed, and Nessa let it, because weeding had been his job and she could not bring herself to start. The owl did not mind the mess. It ate the mice that had taken over the compost heap, and it swivelled its head round whenever the back gate creaked.

On Friday the cat from number nine came over the wall with murder in its shoulders. Nessa reached for the broom, but the owl dropped from the branch without a sound, opened its wings, and simply sat on the cat's path until the cat, reconsidering everything, went back over the wall. "Fair enough," Nessa said. She fetched a tin of birdseed and a saucer of water.

By June the bindweed was cut back to the fence and there was a clear patch of earth under the tree. The owl stayed on the same branch, feet gripping the twig as though it had been there longer than the cherry had. Nessa took a trowel out to the patch and began, very slowly, to dig.