Black and grey owl and sugar skull tattoo with a dark red rose on an upper arm, in a neo-traditional style.

Owl and sugar skull on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

An owl with heavily shaded feathers sits above a sugar skull whose eyes are replaced by flowers, with a scalloped ornamental pattern below. A dark red rose sits to the right of the skull and the rest of the piece is in black and grey. Shading is smooth and detailed, with bold outlines and a high-contrast tonal range across the owl and skull.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Owl Sugar skull Flower Rose Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gwen Pryce had been awake since midnight with the ewe in the end pen, and by three the lamp had begun to smell of paraffin. Outside, frost had got into the gate hinges so that every shift of wind made them sing. Her brother Idris was meant to take the second watch, but he had gone down to the village for the Mari Lwyd and not come back, so she sat on an upturned bucket and waited for the lamb to decide.

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Above the barn door a tawny owl had been calling all week from the sycamore, and tonight it dropped onto the rail of the pen and turned its head at her in that unhurried way owls have, as if it had been sent to check her work. Gwen had been told as a girl that an owl on the roof meant a death in the house. Her grandmother had laughed at that and kept a dish of marigolds on the sill for the dead, pale orange flowers she pressed into paper skulls every October for the village children to paint.

The lamb came at twenty to four, slick and unwilling, and Gwen worked it free with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. It breathed. The ewe groaned and licked it clean. Gwen sat back against the hurdle, her hands steaming, and the owl ruffled its feathers and lifted off the rail without a sound.

In the morning she found the paper skull her grandmother had made hanging from a nail inside the barn door, its eyes two marigold heads gone brown with age. Nobody had hung it there. She took it down, looked at it for a long moment, and pinned it back up with the flowers facing out, where the first grey light could find them. Then she went to wake Idris and tell him he had missed the lambing.