Black and grey owl tattoo perched on a sketched branch across the upper back, with soft shaded linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl on a branch across the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a small owl with large round eyes sits on a bare branch that sweeps across the upper back and over the shoulder blade. The linework is soft and sketch-like, with grey shading on the feathers, branches and twigs. The image is in black and grey and is cropped to the back and shoulder with long brown hair falling over the right side.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

...and that's why the surveyor never got his saw to the ash, not once, though he came back three summers running with a new man and a louder van. Mind you, Dora Penhale always said the owl was the reason, and she'd know, because she was the one who fed it.

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The ash had been dead since the winter the river rose over the lower meadow. Every bare limb of it reached out over Pell Lane like fingers counting something. Nobody liked to sit under it after dark. But the owl came in October, small as a teacup, with eyes big enough to hold the whole of the lamplight, and it took the top branch as if somebody had reserved it.

Dora left a saucer of mice on the wall for it, which her husband said was the daftest thing in the parish. Then in the spring the surveyor's lad, Tom Ashby, with a sunburnt neck and a rope over his shoulder, climbed the trunk to tie off and found the wood under the bark still green where the owl had been roosting. He wrote it up in his report, and that meant the council had to pay for a survey of the survey.

So the ash stands, and the owl with it, and if you walk Pell Lane at dusk you'll hear it before you see it. Don't go expecting a moral from me. Dora only liked company in the dark, and so, it turns out, did the tree.

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