Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and woman portrait on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's profile is drawn in the centre of a large arm piece, with an owl's head and wings resting above her. The linework is dark and fine, with the owl's feathers and the swirling hair rendered in detail. Purple shading fills the hair and parts of the owl, with lighter skin tones left around the figure.

Neo-trad Upper arm Owl Woman Portrait Hair Swirl Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had counted the lamp's turns for eleven winters before she admitted to anyone that the owl on the gallery rail was not the same owl each night. The keeper, her uncle Tom, said barn owls did that, switched perches like sailors switched bars. She didn't argue. She carried the paraffin up the iron stairs at dusk, her hair tied back with string, and kept the brass polished so the beam could reach the Skerry Rocks.

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The night the Ardnish trawler went missing, the fog came in like wet wool and the lamp seemed to swallow its own light. Mairead climbed to the lantern with a spare mantle in her apron pocket. Out past the glass, something pale rose from the water. It had a woman's face, long and calm, and hair that moved like kelp in a slow tide, purple in the lamplight and threaded with small grey feathers. Above it spread the wings of an owl, great and patient, its eyes two round moons.

She did not scream. She had grown up with stories about the keeper of drowned men, and she had always thought them the sort of thing grandmothers invent to keep children off the rocks. The figure lifted one hand and pointed northeast, toward the gap between the reefs where the crew would be drifting, and the owl turned its head all the way round to look at her.

Mairead swung the lamp to that bearing and held it there until her arms shook. At dawn the trawler limped in with its nets full of holes and its men shouting. Nobody mentioned the owl. The feathers she found on the gallery rail the next morning she kept in a biscuit tin, and she never saw the owl-woman again, though on foggy nights she still turned the beam a fraction northeast, just in case.