Colour neo-traditional tattoo of an owl above a sugar skull with red roses and a diamond, on a lower leg, shown in three side-by-side panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and sugar skull on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bold owl with a blue-grey breast, yellow-orange wing feathers and a diamond on its crown sits above a sugar skull with red and yellow roses in its eye sockets and a diamond on its forehead. Feathered wings with orange and brown tones frame the skull, and the shading is smooth with heavy black outlines. The image shows three panels of the same tattoo on a lower leg against a light background.

Neo-trad Traditional Calf Owl Sugar skull Diamond Rose Wing Skull Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had sat on the net loft roof since before the boats were painted, and Marisol Vaughan had stopped asking why it never blinked when the wind came off the harbour. Tonight it was watching the lamp in the chapel window, the one her brother Tomas had promised to keep lit until the Mary Ellen came round the headland. The lamp had been burning three days now, and the oil tin was almost empty.

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She climbed the ladder with the tin under one arm and her mother's ring pinched in her fist. The owl turned its wide amber stare on her and did not move. "You want the boat back," it said, in the flat voice of someone who had read the weather off a thousand drowned men's faces. "Everything costs something on this rock." She opened her hand. The stone caught the lamplight and threw it back in blue and white, the colour of the water under the cliffs. The owl took it in its talons and lifted it to the crown of its head, where it settled like a second eye.

She did not see the boat come in. She was asleep against the chapel door when the bell started, and when she woke the light was grey and thin and the owl was gone from the loft roof. Down on the slip, Tomas was hauling a net, soaked to the elbows and swearing at the gulls, and the Mary Ellen rode low and whole behind him.

That evening she went back to the chapel with a pot of red paint and her brother's old brushes. She painted roses in the eye holes of the skull her grandmother had carved above the door, one for each of the men the sea had kept, and a single white stone on its brow. Above it, when the wind shifted, something large and patient settled onto the lintel and watched the harbour.