Neo-trad style tattoo design of a teal owl wearing a top hat and goggles, with a shaded pink and purple rose beneath it, on a textured teal background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl in a top hat above a rose

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured illustration of an owl wearing a black top hat and round goggles, perched above a large rose with dark green leaves. The owl has teal feathers with fine line detail and ornate patterning on its face, while the rose is shaded in pink, purple and cream. The design sits centrally on a mottled teal background with a faint circular motif.

Neo-trad Owl Top hat Rose Goggles Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove, you lot, and mind the draught from the door. Nobody danced at the Lantern Rooms before midnight, and the owl did not dance at all until the night the gramophone broke. Mr Hollis Crane had kept the hall on Gallowgate for thirty years. He wore a black silk hat that had been to two funerals and one wedding, and brass goggles he never took off, not even to sleep. Some said he could see the moths in the rafters from the bar. Some said he could see what the dancers were thinking.

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Then the Rooms had its last band, a girl with a cornet and a rose pinned to her coat, and she played so slow the floor forgot to stomp. The owl came down from the gallery beam that night and sat on the piano lid. Nobody thought to be afraid of it, because it had the good manners to be wearing a hat. Hollis tipped his own hat to it, and that was the start of the arrangement.

Every Saturday after that the bird took the same perch, and every Saturday a rose appeared on the bar, fresh cut, its dark leaves still wet from somebody's garden. Nobody ever saw who brought it. The cornet girl swore she never did. Hollis said the owl had a fine taste in flowers and no use for the rest of us, which was why it was owed a dance.

So on the last night the hall was ever open, when the council men came with their clipboards and the lights went down for good, the owl flew to the middle of the empty floor, turned one slow circle, and went out through the cracked skylight. In the morning Hollis swore the rose was still on the bar, pink and purple and quite unbothered, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice it was the only thing in the room that had been properly dressed.