Owl face tattoo with yellow eyes, soft purple wash shading and black branch-like lines extending outward, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl face with branch lines on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A stylised owl face sits centrally, with two yellow eyes outlined in black and a soft lavender and purple wash shading the feathers. Thin black lines extend from the top of the head and down the sides, resembling twigs or branches. The shading fades toward the bottom of the design, and the tattoo is photographed on smooth skin against a plain background.

Neo-trad Back Owl Branches Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and leave the sausage rolls alone until I've finished. You all remember the sycamore behind the bike shed at Hollins Lane. Nobody climbed it after the bell, because the owl lived in the fork of it, and that owl had eyes like two coins somebody had dropped in the gravy. Mr Hollis said it was a tawny. Dougal Venn swore it was a witch's familiar, and he had the scratches to prove it.

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Now, the summer we left, there was a girl called Ruth Ancell who wouldn't go home at half three. She'd sit on the wall with her satchel on her knees and wait. Every evening the owl came down out of the branches, slow as a dropped coat, and settled on the wall beside her. Nobody else ever saw it do that. They said she was making it up, the way you do at eleven, when the truth is too big to carry in a pencil case.

Then came the wet in March, and the sycamore came down in the night. The owl went with it. Ruth stood in the car park in her wellies, looking at the stump, and the rain running off the broken limbs looked like ink washing down a page. She says the colour of that rain stayed in the air long after the light had gone, purple at the top and grey at the bottom, like a thing going quietly out of focus.

So when you see her tonight by the raffle table, don't ask about the bird. Ask her where she keeps the feather. She'll tell you it's pressed in her hymn book, and she'll be lying, and that lie is the best story anyone's told in this hall since the caretaker set fire to the nativity.