Traditional colour tattoo of an owl perched on a branch with stars and clouds, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl on a branch on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A horned owl with orange, brown and black feathers sits on a branch, with yellow talons and a red berry at its feet. Stars and outlined cloud shapes fill the background behind its head. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour give it a classic traditional look, and the design wraps over the upper arm and shoulder.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Owl Star Cloud Branch Feather Talon Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had taken the rowan by the signal box again, and Mr Pryce wanted her shifted before the Whitsun excursions came down from Shrewsbury. So at dusk I climbed up with a sack over one shoulder and a torch I did not need, because the sky above Clunton was already pricked with stars and a long bank of cloud lay low over the hills like wool left out on a hedge.

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She was sitting on the lowest branch, upright and unbothered, her horns lifted and her yellow eyes catching my light the way the signal lamps did when the oil was fresh. She regarded me as though I were the one who had lost my way. I had been a porter at the junction for three weeks, and nobody had told me that a tawny owl kept the same branch for years, or that the red berries dropping onto the platform each autumn were hers to eat as she pleased.

I did not shift her. I sat on the wooden step and waited for the eleven forty from Hereford, which came through with its lamps blazing and rattled the glass in the box behind me. When the last carriage had gone, she dropped a berry at my boot, then another, as neat as a clerk leaving receipts. Mr Pryce asked me in the morning whether the bird had gone.

"She's signed on," I told him.

He grumbled, but he left the ladder where it was. The next day there was a berry on the signal box sill, bright as a lamp, and I left it there.