Colour Japanese-style tattoo of an owl perched on a blossoming branch across the ribs, with red flowers and yellow and orange plumage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and cherry blossom on the ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a wide-eyed owl perched on a dark brown branch, with red cherry blossoms and scattered petals around it. The owl's feathers are shaded in yellow and orange with fine scale-like detailing, and the branch and outlines are in dark brown and black. The design wraps around the side of the torso, with the warm, yellow-toned photograph softening the overall palette.

Japanese Ribs Owl Cherry blossom Branch Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came to Thornwick Halt the winter the signal box burned, and it sat on the old cherry tree by the down platform as if it had been waiting for a train. The porters said it watched the timetable. It turned its head when the six-ten came in and turned it back when the lamps went out.

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Mrs Abney kept the tea room and fed it crusts. She said an owl on a station meant someone on the line would not come home, and she set a saucer of milk out anyway. Each spring the cherry flowered early, red rather than white, and petals drifted across the platform where the oil cans stood. Her son Edwin worked the signals and did not believe a word of it.

One March night the fog came down as thick as wool. Edwin was out on the embankment with a lantern, the last goods train somewhere beyond the cutting. He lost the path and then lost the rails. The owl dropped from the branch and flew ahead of him, low, always just where the lantern caught its pale feathers, until the sleepers were under his boots again. He stood at the points breathing hard while the owl settled on the fence post above him.

The goods train came through at ten past eleven, late and safe. In the morning the owl was gone, and a single cherry petal lay in the milk saucer, dry as paper. Mrs Abney kept it in her tin for the rest of her life. Edwin never again called the owl a bad sign. He said it was only a bird that knew the way home, and a petal in a tin was a fair price for a lamp.