Owl in top hat with monocle and roses
Neo-trad · Colour · Flash
A drawing of an owl wearing a striped top hat with a pink feather and a monocle on a chain, set within a grey scrolled ornamental frame. Four magenta roses with olive and orange leaves sit in the corners of the green background. The owl has teal eyes and white and grey shaded plumage, with bold black outlines throughout.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The owl at Hollin Gap has kept the toll for longer than the road has had a name, and he will not let you through until you have paid him in something he considers worth the trouble. You arrive at dusk with a carter's mule and a cough, and he is perched on the milestone in a black top hat, a pink feather tucked into the band like a quill he has forgotten to use. The monocle hangs on its chain. He looks at the mule for a long time before he looks at you.
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"Coin is common," he says. "Tell me something I did not already know, or leave the way you came."
You have nothing but a bundle of letters for a widow in the valley below, sealed with wax you cannot afford to break. You think of the roses that grow wild on the lower slopes, magenta and crowded, the kind that bloom in spite of the wind. You tell him about them: how they lose every petal in a single night of frost and still come back the next spring, thicker at the root. The owl turns the monocle towards the pass, then back to you.
He steps aside. Behind him the path climbs into the cloud, and the grey scrollwork of the ridge lies over the stones like frost on iron. "Mind the second bend," he says. "The widow's husband tried to pay me in boots. I had to take the boots." Then the feather lifts in a gust, and you are through, the letters still warm inside your coat.
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