Black and grey tattoo of an owl perched on a vine branch across the top of a foot, with shaded feathers and leaves.

Owl on a branch on the foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey owl sits on a thin branch with curling vines and leaves, running across the top of a bare foot. The owl has large round eyes and dotted, lace-like detailing on its wings and chest, with soft grey shading giving it depth. The photograph is taken straight on with the toes visible at the bottom of the frame, and the tattoo fills the centre of the composition.

Other Owl Branch Vine Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still and hold your tongue, because the owl won't come down while you're fidgeting. Our Dai's father swore it was the same owl that sat on the headgear at Blaenhafod the winter the cage jammed. Grey as ash, with eyes like two wet pennies, and a lace of pale dots down its front that the wives said was frost stuck to it.

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Every night shift the men went past the wheel with their lamps knocked on, and every night the owl sat on the same thin ash bough above the shaft mouth, turning its head at the cage as if it were counting heads. Nobody liked to say it out loud, but when the owl left its perch the men knew to stop and look up. Dai's father never went down without a look up first.

The winter of the roof fall, the owl was gone by the Tuesday. The lamp men went down anyway, because coal does not wait on anybody's feelings, and the cage came up at half past four with eleven men in it. Dai's father was the twelfth. He had stopped at the top to tie a bootlace, and as he bent over he heard wings go over his head like a wet sheet being shaken out.

He always said the bird came back to that bough the morning after, and that it looked down at him the way a wife looks at a man who has been told to take his coat and go anyway.