Shaded grey owl perched on a black branch with pink blossoms, tattooed across a shoulder.

Owl on a blossom branch on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A grey, shaded owl with large round eyes sits on a bold black branch that curves around it. Pink blossoms are spread along the branches, and the owl's body is built up with soft grey shading and fine detail on the face and feathers. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a shoulder, with colour and grey tones balanced across the design.

Shoulder Owl Branch Blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had kept to the plum branch since the frost broke, and Mrs Hale at the post office said it was bad luck to let a bird that size sit so still over the lane. Nell Corrigan had no time for luck. The blossom had come out a fortnight early, the agent from Leeds wanted the old tree down before the council widened the road, and the saw in her coat pocket weighed more than it should have. She climbed the orchard wall at first light and reached for the lowest limb.

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The owl watched her from the fork with eyes like two pale saucers and did not move. The bark was wet and black as slate, and when the blade bit, pink petals came down over her wrists, soft as something apologising. Her grandfather had grafted this tree the summer she was born and had never let anyone take more than a whisper off it. She sawed three strokes, then four, and the owl turned its head all the way round, slowly, as if to ask whether she meant to finish.

She stopped. The saw slid down the bricks and landed in the nettles. A sheet of Leeds letterhead was folded in her other pocket, and she read it again by the grey light, the word clearance underlined twice in someone else's ink. The owl dropped from the branch without a sound and settled on the wall an arm's length away, claws tucked, and the two of them sat there while the petals kept falling on the grass.

By the time the church clock struck seven she had left the saw where it lay. She walked back down the lane to the post office, bought a stamp and wrote a single line to the agent saying the tree was not for sale. When she looked back over the wall, the owl was still there, grey against the blossom, keeping watch as though it had been hired for the job.