Colour neo-traditional tattoo of an owl above a sugar skull with green flower eyes and red roses, shown on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and sugar skull with roses

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold owl with wide yellow eyes and a pink-tipped crest sits above a sugar skull with green daisy-like eyes and a red heart nose. Red roses fill the gaps on either side, and the owl's brown and green feathers continue behind the skull. Thick black outlines and saturated red, green, yellow and brown ink give the design a vivid, flat-shaded look against the skin.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Owl Sugar skull Rose Flower Skull Feather Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ioan had been told the owl was a bad omen, the way the old steward told it, and he had believed it until the bird came down off the broken keep and settled on the lintel of the chapel door as if it had been expecting him. Its eyes were the colour of the lamp he carried, and it did not blink when he set the sugar skull down on the step.

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The skull was Mari's work. She made them in the bakery kitchen every October, pressing sugar into moulds and painting the eyes with green flowers, because she said daisies were the only thing that looked honest on a face. She had sent one up the hill that morning, wrapped in waxed paper, with a note that read: for the owl, if it ever comes to the door. He had laughed at her then. Now the roses she had tied to the gatepost were wilting in the wind off the moor, red petals sticking to the wet flagstones.

He thought of the men who had lived here, the lord who lost the castle to a card game, the mason who carved an owl above the arch so the birds would keep the rats down. Ioan had heard that a bird who takes a gift stays until it is repaid. He crouched, peeled back the paper, and snapped the little red heart off the skull's nose. He laid it on the step between them.

The owl dropped to the stone, took the heart in its beak, and lifted off towards the village lights. By morning there was a single brown feather on the step, a rose petal beside it, and a note in Mari's round handwriting asking whether he had come down yet. He had not. He found he did not want to.