Owl perched on a blossom branch in grey shading with pink flowers, tattooed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl on blossom branch across upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey owl with large round eyes sits on a branch that has pink blossoms and small green leaves, with a few petals falling below it. The owl and branch are shaded in grey and black, with the eyes, feet and flowers in warm and pink colour accents. The design is centred on the upper back, and the photograph shows the wearer from behind in a grey vest top.

Botanical Back Owl Branch Blossom Flower Petal Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had claimed the blossom branch over the orchard gate the week my brother left for the mill towns, and nobody in Harrow Dene thought to move her on. She sat there through the wet spring with her round eyes fixed on the lane, as though she expected a late cart and meant to be the first to see it.

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My mother said owls brought news. My father said they brought mice, and mice brought nothing but trouble to a cider press. I believed my mother, because I was nine and Joss had promised to write. Every evening I climbed the wall and counted the petals that came down past the owl's grey shoulders, and every evening she turned her head a full half circle to watch me count.

By May there was no letter, only a rumour from the carter that Joss had signed on to a barge bound for Gloucester. I stopped counting. The petals kept falling anyway, pink and loose, catching in the bracken where the path went into the beeches. I told the owl what the carter had said, and she blinked slowly, the way old people do when they have heard a thing before.

One dawn in June I found a folded paper tucked beneath her feet, damp and blotched with rain, in Joss's cramped capitals: HOME BY THE HAY CUT. I stood at the wall until the sun came up pink through the trees, and a single petal drifted down and settled on the owl's wing, where it stayed.