Black and grey ink splash drawing of an owl's face with two staring eyes, shown on a plain white background.

Owl face in ink splash

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a stylised owl face with two large, detailed eyes and a small hooked beak, emerging from loose ink splatters and brush strokes. The eyes and beak use fine shading and sharp contrast, while the surrounding splashes and washes are softer and more abstract. The design is in black and grey on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Owl Eye Beak Bird Ink splatter Brush stroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The corridor lights on the paediatric ward dimmed at ten, and Nadia Okafor had learned to read the building by its sounds after dark: the squeak of a trolley with a bad wheel, the hiss of the oxygen line in bay four, the long sigh of the lift doors on the third floor. Tonight she was waiting for one sound in particular, the buzz of the handset on her belt that meant a new admission from A&E.

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It came at twenty past two. A boy of seven, feverish and furious, his grandmother following the gurney with a carrier bag full of library books. Nadia took the notes, checked the drip, and sat on the edge of the plastic chair while the boy stared at her with eyes so wide and dark they seemed to take up his whole face. He asked whether the hospital had owls. She said it had one, on the roof, that came down to hunt the pigeons, and that she had never seen it herself. He said that was a lie. She said it probably was.

By four his temperature had broken, and the grandmother had fallen asleep upright with her chin on her chest. Nadia wrote up the chart in neat blue ink, the splatter of a cold cup of tea spreading across the corner of the page as she set it down. Through the window the sky over the car park had gone the colour of wet slate, and something pale slid off the edge of the roof and out over the bins without a sound.

She watched it go. Then she went to check on bay four, where the boy was awake again, waiting for her with his hand raised, one finger pointing at the ceiling as though he had already seen the owl come back.