Small solid black owl tattoo with fine swirling vine lines on the inner wrist, shown in a close photograph of a forearm and hand.

Owl and swirls on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl with solid black body, white eye shapes and a pale belly is set in the centre of the inner wrist. Thin black swirling lines and curled flourishes extend out to either side of the owl, forming a symmetrical band. The image is black ink on light skin against a grey textured background, with the hand closed in the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Owl Swirl Vine Flourish Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bakers of Hollin Crook lit their ovens while the owls were still hunting, and the old custom was that the first loaf out belonged to whichever bird had kept the flour sacks clear of mice. Nobody could remember who had made the rule, only that it had always been kept, and that the grey barn owl on the hayloft beam had always been paid in crust.

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Marjorie Fenn had buried her husband that spring and found the custom tiresome. One morning she sold the first loaf to a carter from the valley road, wrapped it in brown paper, and did not look up when the owl swept past the window. After that the dough would not hold. It sagged in the tins, the flour came alive with weevils, and the oven drew smoke in long curling strands that twisted back on themselves like bindweed up a gate. Her neighbours took their bread to the next village.

On the twelfth morning she rose in the dark with a cob loaf in her hands, carried it out to the wall, and set it down warm side up. She stood back in the cold and waited. Nothing came. She went in, put her hands in the trough out of habit, and felt the dough loosen under her palms as if something had breathed on it.

When she turned round the owl was perched on the rim of the sack bin, watching her with its two pale discs of eyes. Marjorie cut the next loaf as the first light came grey over the moor and gave it to the carter's boy, who had walked all the way back for it. The owl took its crust at sunrise and left a single feather on the ledge, and the bread rose true for thirty years after.