Black and grey owl tattoo with a crescent moon above a mandala design on the outer thigh, in a blackwork and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and mandala on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl with wide, staring eyes sits at the centre of the design, with a crescent moon drawn in stippled dots above its head. Below the owl, a symmetrical mandala-like flower and petal shapes fill the space, with a striped, tapered element at the base. The work uses solid black fills, fine hatching and dense dotwork shading in black and grey only, with the tattoo photographed against a dark background on the upper thigh.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Owl Moon Mandala Flower Geometric pattern Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came down onto the harbour wall the night the Kittiwake was due in and didn't, and it sat on the iron bollard with its eyes fixed on my lantern as if I were the one who owed someone an explanation.

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Mr Oddie at the chandlery had warned me the bar at Sallow Mouth moves when nobody is watching it. I had spent the evening with a pencil and a cold cup of tea, drawing the rings of the rose compass on the back of the chart the way Hannah Pell used to, petals layered out from a single brass point until the paper looked like a flower that had been stared at too long. Above the harbour the moon was going thin, only its rim left, and I could see it through the fog the way you see a coin at the bottom of a well.

When I looked up again the owl had moved to the striped post at the end of the mole, the one that tapers like a spent candle, and it was watching the water. Then it opened its wings and went out over the rocks without a sound. A minute later the foghorn at the Mouth gave one long note, and the Kittiwake's lamps swung round the point. She came in slow, her hull scraping the sill, and the first man off her had a grey feather caught in his collar, barred dark at the tip, which he tried to brush away and couldn't.

I didn't mention the owl to anyone. I folded the chart into the drawer with the tide tables, pressed the petals flat under my thumb, and left the lamp burning until the moon had gone altogether.