Neo-traditional tattoo of an owl with a sugar skull beneath it, shaded in black and grey with blue accents, on the outer thigh.

Owl and sugar skull on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A bold owl with wide blue-eyed face and feathered wings sits above a sugar skull decorated with an ankh and heart-shaped eyes, with a blue diamond on the owl's brow. The linework is heavy and black, with grey shading on the feathers and skull and blue used for the eyes, diamond, ankh and wing tips. The design is centred on a close crop of the outer thigh against plain skin.

Neo-trad Thigh Owl Sugar skull Diamond Ankh Wing Heart Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and stop fussing with those crab pots. I'll tell you about the owl that came off the Mary Ellen the winter the herring failed, because my grandfather swore she was the only honest thing aboard.

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Ezra Quill had brought her from a market in Lisbon, a barn owl in a crate with a painted skull on the lid, and he never could say what the skull was for. Some old woman had sold it to him for a shilling and a promise that the bird would bring back whoever it watched over. The men laughed. Then the Mary Ellen went out in the black weather off the Scarrow rocks, and the owl sat on the mast-head all night with those blue eyes open wide as dinner plates. When the boat limped in at dawn, every man was counted, and the owl was the only one who had kept watch.

Ezra went out the next spring and didn't come back, so the owl stayed with the harbour widow, Maud Tregenza, who fed her sugar and mackerel and never once asked why the skull on her wings had heart-shaped holes for eyes. Maud said that was a kindness, a way of seeing a man's sorrow without having to look straight at it.

The last anyone saw of the bird was her perched on the lighthouse rail on the night of the big storm, a blue jewel glinting on her brow like a lamp lit for somebody else. Maud walked out to fetch her in. The owl was gone, but the rail was dry, and the sea below had gone flat as a plate. Make of that what you will. I've made my peace with it.