Traditional style owl tattoo with black and grey feathers, red-brown accents and green leaves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and leaves on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl faces forward on the forearm, with a rounded head, wide pale eyes and scalloped feathers across its chest. Its wings are drawn in dark black and grey with bold outlines and red-brown highlights. Olive and red leaves and small red berries fill the space around the bird, and part of another tattoo is visible at the top edge against a green background.

Traditional Forearm Owl Leaves Berry Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that chair in closer, love, the heating on Ward Seven only warms the left side of the room. You'll want to hear this one, because it's about the owl that lived in the old chapel elm behind the laundry, and the night it came in through the broken window of the children's ward.

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Nobody knew how it got past the netting. Sister Doreen said it had been sent by the dead, and the porters said it was just hungry. What Agnes Tully knew was that it sat on the drip stand at three in the morning and stared at her with eyes as wide and pale as two saucers of milk, turning its round head whenever a monitor beeped down the corridor.

The lights went out in the east wing during a storm. The generators coughed, then caught. In the dark the owl dropped from the stand onto the sill, and Agnes saw that the little boy in bed four was awake, his hand reaching for the cord of his call button. She hadn't a torch. The owl didn't need one. It flew to the window, back to the bed, and back again, waiting, until Agnes followed its soft grey shape down the corridor to the store room where a spare oxygen cylinder had been left unlabelled.

The bird was gone by morning, leaving three red berries on the windowsill and one scalloped feather on the boy's pillow. Agnes kept that feather in her badge pocket for forty years, and when people asked why she never once took a night off, she'd only say she had an owl's job to keep.