Colour neo-traditional full sleeve on an arm, shown from several angles, with a horned owl, a lantern, moths and leaves on the upper arm and forearm.

Owl, lantern and foliage full sleeve

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shown from several angles, with a large horned owl with spread red and brown wings at the centre and a glowing lantern below it. Moths, leaves and foliage fill the gaps, with a small squirrel-like animal and a fox-like creature in the surrounding greenery. Bold outlines and rich, saturated colour sit on a dark teal and grey background, with soft shading on the feathers and leaves.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Forearm Owl Lantern Moth Leaves Foliage Feather Squirrel Fox Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moths arrive before the rain does, as they always have at the Skerrin light, and you are up the iron stairs before Mrs Pell can shout that the lamp needs trimming. The lantern room smells of paraffin and wet wool. Outside, the fog has swallowed the cliff path, and something is screeching in the fuchsia hedge below the wall, a vixen probably, back for the hens.

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Your brother left you the light when he went to the mainland, and with it a ledger full of tallies: ships passed, lamps lit, owls seen. The owl came the winter after he left. It sat on the rail outside the glass with its ear tufts flattened, watching you the way a magistrate watches a man in the dock, and it did not blink for the length of a whole watch. You wrote it in the ledger as a bird. You did not write that it looked at the lantern the way a farmer looks at a field he means to plough.

Tonight the moths come thick, pale and eyed like the gold spots on a peacock's tail, and they beat themselves against the lamp until the glass sings. The owl drops from the rail, wings spread wide, red-brown feathers flared against the fog. You reach for the shutter. Then you stop, because the little grey-red thing that has been stealing your wicks is sitting on the ledge beside you with a moth held in its paws, and it is not afraid of you at all.

You open the shutter a crack. The owl takes the moths that would have burned, the squirrel keeps its share, and the lamp goes on sweeping the water for the boats coming in from the west. Under the day's entry, in your brother's old copper-nibbed hand, you write: Lamp kept. Company as usual.