Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Owl and roses on an upper arm
Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo
A large owl with yellow eyes and detailed feather scales sits across the upper arm, with its wing spreading down the arm. Two red roses with green leaves fill the space beside and below the owl, framed by bold black outlines. Bright reds, greens, yellows and browns dominate against a dark background, and the person's face is not shown.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The lamplighter's daughter in Scarhollow kept a grey owl on the sea wall, and every night the owl turned its yellow eyes toward the harbour mouth and waited. The fishermen said it was watching for the boats. Her mother said it was only hungry. Nobody asked the girl, and she did not say.
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On the night the Brannock sailed out with eleven men aboard, the fog came down so thick that the lamps along the quay went to smudges of gold. The owl did not call. It sat on the iron rail with its wings folded close, and when the girl climbed up beside it with a wet shawl and a tin of matches, it spread one wing down over her shoulder the way a mother might, and the fog thinned for the width of a hand.
She struck the matches one after another and held them up to the water. Red roses bloomed from the tar-black sea where her uncle had once thrown the petals of his wedding bouquet, a thing he swore he would never do again. The boats saw them and turned. Eleven came in along the line of flame, though one came in late, and the owl bent its head to the rail and tucked its feathers back in, satisfied.
In the morning the fishwives brought her a red rose cut from the wall garden and said the owl had earned it. The girl pinned it to her collar. The owl only looked at the sea.
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