Traditional style owl tattoo on a person's upper arm, perched on a branch with red roses, a moth and small sparkles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl perches on a branch with a moth, red and pink roses, leaves and small star-shaped sparkles around it. The owl is worked in bold black and grey shading with orange and yellow detailing on its feathers and a red beak, outlined in heavy black linework. The design wraps around the upper arm against a plain dark background, with the subject's face out of frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The owl came back to the damson orchard the week after the frost, and I have decided to forgive it for the mess it made of the hen house. You will laugh, but it sits on the same bough of the old Bramley every evening at dusk, black as a wet coat, with those amber rings round its eyes, looking down at me as if I were the one who needed watching. Your grandad always said owls were bad luck. He said that about most things, mind, including the rain.

Last Thursday a moth the size of my palm came bumbling out of the rose bed by the wall, the pink ones your gran planted before you were born, and it landed on the fence post right under the owl's branch. I thought the owl would take it. Instead it just turned its head, slow as a clock, and watched the moth fan its dusty wings in the last of the light. They stayed like that until the stars came out, one above and one below, neither of them moving.

I sat on the step with my tea going cold and thought about how much of this place is about waiting for something to come out at night. The apples are nearly ready. Pick them too early and they're sour; leave them too late and the wasps have them. The owl knows that better than any of us.

Come up on Saturday if you can. Bring the good secateurs. I want you to see the moth before the first cold takes it, and then you can tell me whether I should have let the owl have its supper.

Love, Nan

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