Colour tattoo of a cartoon owl perched on a branch with pink cherry blossoms, across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and cherry blossom on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a round-eyed owl with blue and violet feathers, perched on a dark grey branch. Pink cherry blossoms, buds and falling petals spread across the shoulder and upper back, with soft shading on the flowers. The owl's orange eyes are the strongest focal point, set against the pale skin and the blossoms on the left.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Owl Cherry blossom Branch Petal Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandmother said the owl at the edge of Ashgrove wood only came down for people carrying something they could not put down. You thought that nonsense for forty years. Still, on the night the lower bridge washed away, you find yourself at the last stile with a torch that has given up and a tin in your coat pocket that rattles every time you breathe.

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The cherry tree by the ditch is in full blossom, which is wrong for November, and the petals come down around you in a slow, uneven drift, pale pink against the grey bark of the bough. The owl sits on the lowest limb. Its feathers are the blue of a pigeon's throat, and its eyes are two amber coins that catch what little light there is. It does not blink. It waits, the way the village used to wait for the tide to turn at the mill.

'Go on, then,' you say, because somebody has to. The tin holds your father's spare buttons, and you were meant to bury it under this tree the morning he died, and you never did. You open the lid. The owl tilts its head a fraction, then takes the brass button with the anchor on it in its beak, and lifts off without a sound.

You walk home by the road, not the wood. Behind you the blossom keeps falling, and by the time you reach the chapel gate a petal has settled on your sleeve, cool as a coin. The tin is lighter by one button. You realise the bird was never after the buttons.