Black ink drawing of an owl with a sugar skull woman's face on its chest, gripping a branch, in a dotwork and neo-trad style with no body placement shown.

Owl and sugar skull woman design on a branch

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink drawing of a large-eyed owl whose chest forms a painted sugar skull woman's face with curled hair and a small rose on the owl's brow. The owl's feathers and the woman's face are built from fine linework and dense stippling, with bold ornamental patterns around the eyes and crown. The design is shown in black and white on a plain background, with a bare branch held in the owl's talons at the bottom.

Dotwork Neo-trad Owl Sugar skull Branch Feather Rose Floral ornament Talon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the fishing town of Skerrow Quay, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, Maud Ferrier, kept an owl on the breakwater wall. Nobody knew whose it was. It came each dusk to perch on the same iron bollard, gripping a bare ash branch it had carried up from the cliff path, and it stayed there until the lamps were lit.

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Every night when the boats were out, the owl turned its head toward the bay and counted. Old Tobias the net-mender said it counted the men one by one, and that it counted them back again when they came home. Its face was painted pale, with black rings round the eyes and a small rose set above its brow, and the old women said it was the face of somebody's grandmother who had gone to sea long ago and never stopped looking for the boats.

In the autumn of the great gale, the Marigold did not come in. Maud climbed to the wall with a storm lantern and found the owl already there, its great eyes fixed on the black water. She set her lamp down beside it and said nothing. The owl lifted one talon, slowly, and pointed toward the south side of the harbour where the rocks ran out, and Maud understood that it was asking her to look rather than wait.

She went down the wet steps with a coil of rope and a boathook. She found the Marigold's boy clinging to a buoy and dragged him onto the stones. When she looked back up, the bollard was empty, and a single black feather lay on the step, curled like a comma. Maud kept it in her tin box for the rest of her life, and she never again asked the owl what it had been counting.