Neo-traditional flash design of a green and blue owl perched on a branch, with a purple rose on its chest and swirling smoke around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl on a branch with rose

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn owl with large amber eyes sits on a twisted branch, with a purple rose and pink-edged leaves across its chest. The bold black outlines and flat fills in green, blue, pink and orange give the design a bright, decorative look. Swirling grey smoke wisps and small dotted details fill the background around the bird.

Neo-trad Owl Branch Rose Leaves Smoke Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Gallowgate Park looks up, which suits me. I have kept the same branch above the bandstand since the trams stopped running, a crooked ash limb that forked, snapped and forked again like a badly punctuated sentence. Below me the city keeps its low night tune: bins knocking against the railings, a taxi idling outside the Lantern Bar, a radio somewhere playing the same three bars of soul over and over. The smoke from the old gasworks chimneys drifts across the rooftops and wraps itself round my branch like it has nowhere better to be.

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Every night at half two, Marta Oyelaran pulls the shutter on her flower stall at the corner of Dock Street and leaves one purple rose in the bucket by the bins. She thinks nobody sees. I have watched her do it since the winter her husband's van stopped outside the hospital and never came back for him. The rose is always the same deep violet, with pink-edged leaves folded tight around it, and always a little wilted by morning, as if it has been carried a long way in a coat pocket.

Tonight I came down for it. I took it in my talons, which are not made for delicate work, and carried it back up through the smoke to the ash limb, where the wind could not steal it. I had meant to keep it there for the mice to admire. Then the light in her back window came on, and I saw her standing at the glass with one hand flat against it, looking up at the trees as if she had been waiting for something to look back.

I dropped the rose onto the pavement below her shutter. It landed face up, petals open, and she came out in her slippers and picked it up, and for a moment the whole street was quiet except for her laughing into the cold.