Large colour and black-and-grey tattoo of an owl with a sugar skull on the upper arm, the skull decorated with a green shamrock and flowers.

Owl and sugar skull on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl with shaded grey eyes and feathers sits above a sugar skull, which forms the owl's chest. The skull has a green shamrock on its forehead, purple and pink flowers in the eye sockets, and blue, yellow and red scrollwork. The owl's wings and the feather shapes below are shaded in black and grey with bold outlines, and the image is shown in a close crop on the upper arm.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Owl Sugar skull Shamrock Flower Feather Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in closer, the snow's taken the lane and it'll keep us here till morning, so you've time for the owl. Don't look at me like that, Tom Ashby, I'm getting to the owl. It lived in the bell tower of St Hilda's above Carrick Gill, and it had eyes grey as wet slate, shaded so deep you'd swear there was weather in them. Every November, on the night the lanterns went up in the churchyard and the village set out bread for the dead, it came down off the tower and sat on the lych-gate with its wings folded like a sexton's cloak. Its face was painted white as bone, with flowers blooming in the sockets, pink and purple, and a green clover on its brow for luck. Folk said it had been painted by a sailor's widow who wanted her husband to find his way home by it.

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Now, the year the drift came down early, a lad called Elias Corr went out to fetch his mother's sheep from the top pasture and the white closed over him like a lid. He walked in circles till his legs quit. Then, out of the grey, there was a pale glow low to the ground, and a painted face turned towards him. The owl didn't flap or hoot. It just waited, turned its head to keep the flowers in the lantern light, and walked ahead of him one slow step at a time, stopping whenever he fell behind, the way a good shepherd does.

When they reached the inn door, the owl stood on the step and counted him in with a click of its beak. Elias swore he'd heard it counting the names of everyone he'd ever known, living and gone, and that it had only stopped when it reached his own.

So when you hear something knocking on the roof tonight, you leave the latch off and a saucer of milk on the sill. Not for the dead, mind. For the owl, who only ever wanted someone to see them home.