Black and grey traditional tattoo of an owl perched on a sugar skull with flower eyes, across the forearm.

Owl and sugar skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey owl sits on top of a sugar skull with flower-patterned eyes and a decorative lace-like collar, with roses faintly visible behind the skull. The owl has scalloped feather detailing and bold outlines, while the skull uses fine hatching and smooth grey shading. The tattoo fills the forearm, photographed from above against a plain indoor background.

Traditional Forearm Owl Sugar skull Rose Flower Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern is already guttering when you reach the stile, and the owl is waiting on the gatepost as if someone has paid it to be there. Mrs Ashdown's marigolds are crushed in your coat pocket, the orange gone to rust at the edges. Nobody in Hollin Bottom goes into the forest after dark on the night the bells are silent, but your grandmother did, and she left you a list.

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The list is written in her cramped pencil on the back of a seed packet: the names of those who went into the trees and did not come back down, the lane where the cart overturned, the well that is not to be drunk from. Beneath them, underlined twice, is one instruction. Feed the watcher. You had taken it for a figure of speech. The owl turns its head all the way round, which no bird should manage, and its eyes catch your lantern and hold it, round and ringed like the flowers painted on the cheeks of the little skull carved on the gatepost.

So you scatter the marigolds along the path, one petal at a time, the way she showed you, and say each name aloud until the list runs out. The trees do not move. Somewhere below the village a dog stops barking. When you look back the owl has dropped to the lowest branch and is watching you with the patience of something that has kept count for a very long time.

At the stile the lantern gutters out, and in the dark you find the gate standing open where you left it shut. Tomorrow you will tell the vicar it was the wind. But the marigold dust is still on your fingers, the list is folded small in your palm, and when you reach the road there is a single grey feather lying on the stile, as if it were the receipt.