Colour traditional tattoo of an owl wearing a bowler hat with a ribbon, patterned sugar skull style eyes and a teal waistcoat, on the forearm.

Owl in a bowler hat on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

An owl with large round eyes framed by lace-like patterns sits beneath a bowler hat with a patterned ribbon. It wears a teal and blue waistcoat with buttons and has blue and orange feathers along its wings and tail, with a yellow and orange ribbon-like base beneath it. Bold black outlines, smooth shading and bright, saturated ink are set against a dark background.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Owl Sugar skull Feather Ribbon Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls have gone soft in the long grass now, and the wasps have stopped quarrelling over them. You take your post on the crooked bough of the old Blenheim at dusk, as your father did, with your waistcoat buttoned to the throat, because the orchard cools fast this time of year and a gentleman does not greet the night in shirtsleeves. Below, Mr Dunstan's ladder leans against the wall where he left it, and a blackbird complains about it to nobody.

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The jackdaws have been eyeing your hat. Hobbs, the grey-necked one, has taken to perching on the wall beside you and studying the patterned ribbon, head tilted, as if pricing it. "Lend it me for an evening," he says. "I'll bring it back with a shine on it." "You'll bring it back with a nest in it," you tell him. He laughs, a dry clatter, and flaps off towards the pickers' huts where the cider barrels sit under sacking.

That night the moon comes up over the Bramley rows, and Nell comes out with a lantern to check the nets. She finds the hat where Hobbs dropped it in the nettles, brushes the dew from the brim with her sleeve, and sets it on the gatepost with the ribbon re-tied in a neater bow. She does not call out. She only looks up into the Blenheim, lifts the lantern once, and goes back inside.

You do not fly down for it. You stay on the bough with the apples ticking as they cool, and when the first barn owl drifts across the field you find you have buttoned your waistcoat wrong, one hole out, for the first time in years.