Colourful neo-trad owl tattoo with scrollwork and teal blossoms covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Owl and blossoms on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large owl with a purple head, big staring eyes and an orange beak sits at the centre of the design, with teal and purple feathers below. Scrolling ornaments in pink, orange and red frame the owl, and teal flowers with orange centres sit at the lower edge. The bold black outlines and smooth colour shading are set against the skin of an upper arm and shoulder.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Owl Bird Flower Blossom Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came down the lift shaft on the third night of the thaw and perched on the rail beside the kettle, turning its great violet head to look at everyone in turn. Nobody in Harrow Deep had seen an owl since the glass towers went dark, so the grandmothers said it was a messenger and the children said it was hungry.

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Ottilie was the only one who thought to offer it bread. She tore a crust and held it out on her flat palm, the way her father had taught her to feed the goats, and the owl took it with its orange beak so gently that the crust did not even crumble. Then it spoke in the voice of the old pump engine, which had stopped years ago. "Your well is poisoned at the root," it said. "Go to the blue flowers past the salt flats. Where they grow in threes, the water runs clean under the stone."

The village men laughed and said a bird could not tell them where water was. Ottilie went anyway, with a sack of seed and the owl riding her shoulder, its claws hooked into her coat like a pair of brass hooks. On the salt flats the wind carried the smell of rain that had not fallen in a decade. At the edge of the ridge she found the teal flowers growing in threes, their orange hearts open to the sun, and beneath them, when she dug with her hands, a seep of water as cold as a bell.

She carried buckets back for three days. When she returned the last time the men were waiting at the gate with their hats in their hands, and the owl had gone, though a single feather lay on the kettle rail, dyed the colour of a plum. Ottilie kept it in her collar, and the well stayed sweet for as long as anyone in Harrow Deep remembered.