Owl and rose tattoo on upper arm, before and after
Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo
The left panel shows raised, pale scar tissue along an upper arm with no ink. The right panel shows the arm with a colour tattoo of an owl with red eyes and a patterned breast, a green-leaved rose and bold black outlines. A red arrow overlaid on the photo points to the shoulder.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The owl has sat on the rafter above your father's fish stall for three days, and nobody in the Piraeus market can agree whether it is a bad sign or a good one. Each dawn you sweep the scales off the cobbles and find its eyes watching you, bright as wine held up to a lamp. You decide it is only hungry.
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So you begin leaving it the heads of sprats on a flat stone. It takes them without looking at you, turning its patterned breast toward the lamplight as though it were a bronze shield polished for a festival. Old Lysandra, who sells roses in clay pots at the corner, says an owl that stays is a messenger waiting for an answer. She tucks a red rose behind your ear and tells you to think of someone worth sending.
You think of nobody, then of your sister in Aegina who has not written since the spring. You scratch her name on a scrap of papyrus, fold it small, and hold it up. The owl drops from the beam without a sound, takes the slip in one talon, and is gone over the harbour wall before the gulls wake.
Three mornings later the stall is bare except for a single green leaf stuck to the stone. A fisherman from Aegina comes across with a sack of anchovies and a letter in a hand you know. Your sister writes that a grey owl came to her window at dusk and sat there until she read the name aloud.
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