Full back tattoo in a Japanese style showing a large red and brown owl beside cherry blossom branches and a pale moon, with a green bird sleeve on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl, cherry blossom and moon back piece

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece shows a detailed owl with orange-red plumage and a dark eye, perched beside a branch of pink cherry blossom in front of a pale moon. Smoke-like wisps, stylised waves and a green and red bird design on the left upper arm fill the surrounding space. The shading is soft and layered, the linework is bold and the colour palette is dominated by reds, greens and muted browns on dark skin.

Japanese Back Upper arm Owl Cherry blossom Moon Wave Smoke Bird Flame Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lantern, lad, it's the last of the lamp oil until Valparaíso, and the owl won't come to a ship that burns its light for nothing. Sit closer, where the galley smoke can't get in your eyes. Now. Forty days out of Bristol and not a breath of wind, the Hesper lying flat on a sea like pewter. The captain's daughter was aboard, Ada Pryce, nine years old and too clever for her own good, and it was her who first saw the bird.

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It came down out of a clear sky at dusk and perched on the spanker boom, red as a coal in the last light, with eyes like two drops of tar. Nobody had a name for it. The cook swore it was a spirit from the Japan trade, because his brother had sailed there and come home with tales of such birds. Every night after that it turned its head to face the moon, and every night a single pink petal would drift down onto the deck, though there wasn't a blossom tree within a thousand miles. Ada kept the petals in her Bible until the pages went soft as silk.

On the forty-second night the owl lifted off the boom and flew straight at the moon, and the mist came up off the water behind it in long grey ribbons. The men followed the ribbons with their oars. By morning the Hesper was in the lee of a reef none of them had charted, and a breeze was filling her sails from a direction that should not have had any wind in it. The captain never found the reef on any chart after that.

So when you see a red owl sat on a dry mast, you don't whistle at it, and you don't reach for it. You put a coin on the rail and you tell it the name of the ship you're waiting for. Then you go to bed, and you don't look at the moon.