Traditional colour tattoo of a red and grey owl holding two yellow skull-topped keys, with a crescent moon inside a red triangle, on the upper leg.

Owl holding skull keys beside a crescent moon

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A bold owl with red plumage, yellow eyes and a yellow beak stands on a branch, gripping a pair of ornate yellow keys, one with a skull-shaped bow. A yellow crescent moon sits inside an outlined red triangle to the left, and dark grey shading radiates behind the owl. Black outlines, flat colour fills and dark grey feather detail give the piece a classic traditional look.

Traditional Thigh Owl Key Skull Crescent moon Triangle Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Wrenfold road for nine days when Ada Pell found the owl on the cellar steps, sitting as though it had been waiting to be let in. Its feathers were rust and its eyes glowed like lamps. In its talons it held two gold keys, the larger with a bow shaped like a skull, and it set them down on the flagstones without a sound.

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Her grandmother had warned her about the keys. There were eleven doors at the Crooked Hart, and only ten were ever opened. The eleventh stood at the top of the back stair behind a curtain of sacking, and the old men who drank by the fire never looked towards it. The owl hopped after her to the stair and waited there. When the travellers came in out of the white, stamping and cursing, it sat on the beam above the hearth and watched them with its head turned all the way round.

On the third night a tinker named Samuel Leech, who said he owed no man anything, climbed the back stair with a candle and a laugh. Ada heard the lock turn, then heard him go quiet, and then heard the owl call once, low, the way a bell sounds under water. She climbed after him. The room was bare except for a crescent moon scratched into the plaster and a window furred with frost. Samuel stood in the middle of it, his candle guttering, staring at the wall like a man reading his own name.

Nobody ever saw the tinker again, and in the morning the owl was gone from the beam. Ada kept the skull key on a string round her neck and never once turned it. In the thaw she found a single red feather on the top stair, and when the next blizzard came she sat up with the lamp lit, listening for a knock at the one door that never needed one.