Realism style colour tattoo of a owl perched on a branch in front of a pale moon, with green leaves, across the side of a person's torso.

Owl on a branch before a moon

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A brown owl with orange eyes sits on a dark branch with green leaves, set in front of a grey moon. The owl and feather detail are finely shaded, while the branch and foliage are rendered in soft greens and greys with fading edges. The composition is centred on the side of the torso, with the owl's gaze turned towards the viewer.

Realism Botanical Ribs Owl Moon Branch Leaves Bird Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys Harker had worked the night post at Corran Bridge for eleven years, and in all that time the owl had never once looked away first. It sat on the dead ash beyond the barrier, where the lane crossed the river into the rough pasture nobody owned, and every night at half past two it turned its orange gaze onto her lamp as though checking her work.

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The lorry came up from the valley with its headlamps dipped. Its driver, a thin man called Anselm Roth, held out a green folder with the stamps all in order, and Dilys read every line the way her father had taught her, slowly, tapping each seal with a thumbnail. The cab smelled of cold coffee and wet wool. The manifest said three hundred clay pots bound for a garden centre in Ludlow, and she could hear the lie in the way he cleared his throat before he answered her questions.

She could have sent him back to the depot. Instead she stood a long time in the road with the folder held against her chest, listening. Up in the ash the owl gave one low call, the two-note hoot her father had used to say the river was rising and the night was safe to cross. Nothing else in the valley answered it.

She stamped the folder and handed it back. "Go on, then," she said. Roth pulled away without a word, and Dilys watched his tail lights shrink down the valley until the moon slid clear of the ash. The owl opened its wings and went after them, pale against the grey, following the road to wherever the pots were really going.