Owl and sugar skull on a calf
Neo-trad · Calf · Black and grey · Photo
A black and grey tattoo covers the back of a calf, with an owl at the top, a sugar skull with flower-shaped eyes in the centre, and roses on either side. Below the skull sits a scalloped, mandala-like lotus base. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with the skin tone showing through the lighter areas.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The owl had been sitting on the potting shed roof since the first frost, and by the second week of November you had stopped pretending it was there by accident. Aunt Dell called her Mrs Pennock and left a saucer of milk on the water butt each evening, which the owl ignored with great dignity until the lamps went out on the terrace behind the allotments.
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On the morning of the first, Dell carried out the skull. She had made it from sugar and egg white over three nights at her kitchen table, pressed into a mould that had belonged to her mother, and its eyes were marigolds piped petal by petal. She set it on a scalloped bed of clay saucers she called the lotus, because a lotus was what you put under things you wanted kept dry. The rose bushes leaned in on either side and let their last heads fall onto the path.
You were holding the trowel when the owl came down. It did not hurry. It took one sugar marigold in its beak, turned its head the way it had turned it at Dell all autumn, and flew back to the shed roof with the flower like a lit match. Dell laughed until she had to sit down on the step.
"She'll bring it back in spring," Dell said, wiping the sugar from her fingers onto her apron. Then she went inside to make another eye, and you stayed out with the roses, counting the petals the owl had left behind on the path.
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