Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing an ornate owl perched below a peace sign, with feathers and paisley ornament, in black and grey on paper.

Owl, peace sign and feathers design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a front-facing owl with a peace sign above it, surrounded by feathers and paisley and floral filigree. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading in the owl's face and feathers and dotted detail in the ornaments. The drawing is in greyscale on white paper and fills a tall, portrait composition.

Owl Peace sign Feather Paisley Floral ornament Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lane by four o'clock, and by nine the only guests left at the Hollin Gate were a mapmaker from Kendal who snored through every floorboard and a girl with a cello case she would not let anyone carry. I kept the fire going in the snug while the owl kept watch from the beam above the stairs, a carved thing my grandmother had nailed up before the war, its feathers worn smooth by a century of coats brushing past.

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At half past ten the cellarman came up white-faced, saying the back door had been open. Snow lay in a neat drift across the flags, and in it were prints that stopped at the threshold as if the walker had simply lifted away. I went down with the lamp and found nothing but the barrels and a bundle of pressed feathers tucked behind the cider casks, grey and barred and lovely, each one tipped with a tiny brass circle of the kind the tinker used to sell on the moor road before the railway came.

I had known the tinker, Abel Harrow, who traded charms for a night's bed and never once paid in coin. He had gone over the pass in the first snow of 1931 and never come down. I climbed back up, and the owl's glass eyes caught the lamp as if they had been waiting. Something in me decided to trust them. I set the feathers in the window one by one, the way Abel always did, and sat with my back to the cold glass until my hands stopped shaking.

Near dawn the wind dropped. The girl with the cello came down to breakfast, saw the feathers laid along the sill, and smiled as though she had expected them. "He said you'd keep a light on," she said, and I understood the drift had not been a visitor at all but a lamp left burning for someone coming home. I poured her tea and did not ask who he was. The owl said nothing, which, after thirty winters, I have learned is its way of agreeing.