Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a horned owl with spread wings and a red dragon, framed by grey clouds, across the left ribs of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and dragon across the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A horned owl with spread wings dominates the composition, with a red and blue serpentine dragon curling beneath it. Grey cloud shapes and yellow-green swirling lines fill the background, and the wings extend across the side of the torso. Bold outlines and saturated purple, orange, yellow and red ink sit on smooth shading.

Neo-trad Japanese Ribs Owl Dragon Wing Cloud Feather Lightning Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, our Dafydd, and mind the draught from the door, because this is a tale for people who have gone down the shaft and come back up again. My grandfather told it to me in the Ebbw kitchen the winter the Deep Pit flooded, and he swore every word was true, which is what they all swear.

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There was an owl that lived in the old headframe above Shaft Four, a great horned thing with ears like broken gloves and eyes the colour of a lamp turned up. The men called her Mrs Gower, after the schoolteacher, because she watched everything and said nothing. Each night she sat on the wheel and watched the cage drop with its load of men, and each morning she watched them climb out grey as ash without once asking where the dragon was.

For under Shaft Four, past the third level where the seam pinched to nothing, there lay a dragon in the black water, red as a boiled lobster and blue at the throat from the cold. When the pumps stopped one February, the water came up through the floor like a tide, and the dragon rose with it, coiling through the galleries. The lamps went out one by one, and the men heard it singing in the dark.

So the owl did the only thing an owl can do. She dropped down the shaft wings spread wider than the cage, and she lit the air around her with the yellow fire of her own eyes until the dragon turned its head to look. What passed between them, my grandfather never knew. By morning the water had sunk back into the rock, and a thin green lightning was still crawling over the headframe like the ghost of a fuse. Every man came up alive that week, and the feathers she left on the wheel, scorched to copper, are still there if you know where to look.