Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a grey owl perched on a branch with pink blossoms and green leaves, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and blossom branch on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a wide-eyed grey owl perched on a brown branch, with red blossoms and green leaves framing it. The owl has bold black outlines, shaded grey plumage and yellow talons, and the leaves and flowers are filled with flat, saturated colour. The design is centred on the upper back, with the owl's face at the middle of the composition.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Owl Bird Branch Blossom Cherry blossom Flower Leaves Talon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came to the orchard the spring the old cherry split down the middle, and nobody in Harrowby Lane could say where it had flown from. It sat on the lowest bough at dusk with its round eyes open, as if it had been waiting for someone to finish a sentence. Mrs Ashdown tried to shoo it with a broom. It only turned its head the whole way round and looked at her until she gave up.

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Her grandson Tom, who was nine and afraid of nothing except the dark, asked the owl what it wanted. The owl said nothing, which Tom took for a promise. Each evening he carried it a saucer of milk, and each morning he counted the blossoms: seventy-one the first day, then sixty, then forty, because the wind kept taking them down the lane. He began to think the owl was counting too.

On the last night of April a frost came down off the hill and the blossom went grey at the edges. Tom sat under the tree in his coat with a torch. The owl dropped from the branch, landed on his knee, and placed a single red flower in his palm with its beak. The flower was warm. Then the bird lifted into the dark and was gone over the hedge, and the frost stopped at the gate as if someone had called it back.

Mrs Ashdown found the tree in full bloom in the morning, every flower open, and Tom asleep against the trunk with one petal tucked behind his ear. She never learned what the owl had traded. She only noticed that the blossom fell that year a little more slowly, as though the tree had been given a while longer to be beautiful.