Traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing an owl above a woman holding a book labelled WISDOM, set against a red circle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and woman traditional tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A traditional-style tattoo shows a large owl with a red circle behind it, and a woman with dark hair and a red-cheeked face who sits beneath the owl's wing and holds a book reading WISDOM. The linework is bold and black, with solid fills in grey, red, yellow and orange and some dotted detailing on the wing and scalloped border. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a brick wall, with a partly visible tattoo at the left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pen,

Keep reading

I nearly didn't go to the reunion, but you know me, I can't resist a buffet with a raffle. The hall on Larkfield Road has been repainted that dreadful shade of mint, and someone had hung the old school owl badge over the stage, the one Mrs Ashdown used to pin to her cardigan every Thursday. Nobody has had the heart to take it down. Her husband was there, very old now, holding a plastic cup of squash and asking everyone whether they had finished their reading logs.

Then Dennis Okafor, who sat behind me for six years and never once said a word that wasn't an answer, came over with a carrier bag. Inside was the book. Mrs Ashdown's big green book of proverbs, WISDOM stamped on the cover in gold leaf that had long since flaked away. He said he'd taken it home on the last day of Year Six by mistake and never found the courage to bring it back. Forty years. I told him it was fine. It was the most fitting thing anyone has said to me in a decade.

I stood there turning the pages until I reached the one where she'd glued in a picture of an owl, and there in the margin was my handwriting from when I was nine, pressed too hard into the paper: she knows everything, she just waits. I laughed so loudly the raffle man looked over. Dennis only nodded, as if he had been waiting years to hear someone say it out loud.

I've put the book on the windowsill above the sink. It's the only thing in the flat that looks like it's listening. Come up at the weekend and I'll show you the margin. Bring the good biscuits.

Love, Jo

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