Close-up of a colourful owl tattoo with dreamcatcher-style beads and hanging feathers in orange and teal on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and dreamcatcher on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A stylised owl with large round eyes sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by a looped chain of beads and a dreamcatcher-like ring. Two feathers in orange and teal hang from the base, with a small bead drop below the ring. The bold outlines and patterned fills are in orange and turquoise on bare skin, and the tattoo sits off-centre on the upper back against a blurred green background.

Back Owl Dreamcatcher Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had been asleep in the rigging of the Corisande since Gibraltar, and the cook swore it only woke when the ship's bell was wrong. Tobiah Penhallow did not believe him until the third night out of Lisbon, when the bell rang twice for a single watch and the owl turned its great round head from the mast-top and looked straight at him.

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He had been told the bird was a ship's ghost, and he had been told it was the spirit of a drowned navigator's wife, and by the fourth night he had heard enough versions to know that none of the sailors agreed on anything except that it must be left alone. What he knew was that the owl wore a ring of beads at its breast, bright beads like the ones the Mi'kmaq trader had sold the purser in Halifax, and that every evening it looped them slowly with its talons, counting something no one could see.

On the ninth night the wind dropped dead and the sea went flat as tin. Tobiah climbed to the topsail with a knife and a length of cord and cut the beaded ring loose from the wind-catch where it had hung since the purser left it there. The owl dropped from the spar and hung in the air, unfolding teal and orange wings, and it did not fall. It drifted down over the rail to the water and waited, patient, until the first breath of land air came off the coast of Cornwall and filled the sails again.