Neo-traditional owl and sugar skull tattoo with purple roses on a lower leg, shown in grey shading with purple accents.

Owl and sugar skull on a calf

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large owl perches above a sugar skull with feathered wings spreading behind it, with purple roses on either side. The linework is bold and the shading is mainly grey, with a smooth gradient on the feathers and skull. Purple accents appear in the roses, the skull's eye sockets and a small lotus-like detail, against the pale skin of the leg.

Neo-trad Other Owl Skull Sugar skull Rose Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had kept the ruin of Harrowgate Keep longer than anyone in the valley could remember. Every dusk she sat on the broken lintel above the chapel door and turned her great pale eyes down the road, counting the carts that came up from the mill at Ashby Water. Nobody dared climb to her perch, and nobody needed to, for the old women said she had a sister who lived inside the skull of the lord who died there, and that the two of them kept the count between them.

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In the spring of the hard winter, a girl named Hannah Crewe came up the hill with a basket of bread for the shepherds' lodge. She had no fear of owls. She sat on the wall, broke a crust, and told the bird her brother had gone south for the wool fair and not come home. The owl said nothing, which Hannah took for listening. When the moon rose over the keep, the feathers at the owl's shoulders lifted like wings, and the stone beneath them split open to show a room full of marigolds and candles, where a painted skull sat smiling at a table laid for two.

The skull was the lord's wife, the old women said, and she had been waiting for someone to bring her news rather than grief. Hannah sat with her until cockcrow and carried back a single purple rose, pressed flat in her shawl. Her brother walked into the village three days later, thin as a rake and talking of a stranger who had sold him a map in a wayside inn.

Hannah never told anyone where the news had come from. But every dusk after, she left bread on the wall, and every dusk the owl took it, and the carts came down from Ashby Water before the bell had finished ringing.