Black and grey traditional tattoo of an owl above a sugar skull with flower eyes and diamonds, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and sugar skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

An owl with wide eyes and a diamond on its head sits above a sugar skull with flower-shaped eye sockets and a diamond on its forehead. Wings spread down the sides of the skull, and the design is filled with solid black areas and grey shading. The tattoo covers most of the forearm, set against a dark, softly blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift your stool in by the range, boy, and mind the pan. You want the owl story before the bread is proved, do you? Fair enough. The owl over the galley hatch was called Mistress Vane, and she came aboard at Bristol in a crate of pickled limes, which tells you the sort of company she kept.

Keep reading

The skull came later, carved by a carpenter named Tomás who had lost his wife to fever in Veracruz. He sat up at night making sugar skulls for the men who could not afford a proper Christmas, pressing paper flowers into the eye sockets so the dead would have something pretty to look at. Mistress Vane took a liking to that skull and perched on its crown every night once the bells had gone.

The trouble came in the Doldrums. Our cook, a sour man called Hobbs, stole a diamond from the captain's ring, pressed it into the skull's brow to hide it, and swore the ship would founder if anyone asked after it. For three nights the sails hung like wet washing. On the fourth the owl came down from the hatch, took the stone in her beak, and set it on her own head, where it has sat ever since. The wind came up behind her like a dog that had finally been called.

So when you sweep this galley, keep one eye on the hatch. The night watch gets a good owl and a cook who keeps his mouth shut. Now pass me that flour, and mind you don't sing.

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