Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Owl perched on a branch, drawn design
Black and grey · Flash
A front-facing owl sits centred on a pair of bare, twisted branches, with a small sprig rising above its head. The owl's wings and chest are built up with fine hatched and stippled shading, and its eyes are drawn with strong dark pupils. The image is entirely black and grey on a pale paper background, with the design filling the middle of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Third night on the Tollbridge crossing and the owl has not moved from the willow stump by the lamp post. Mrs Ibbotson from the ferry cottages says it has been there since the frost, and that it is a bad sign. I told her the only bad sign on this towpath is the rent collector. She did not laugh. Her husband went through the ice last winter, and she watches birds the way other people watch clocks.
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Tonight I walked the bridge at two with the lantern low, and the bird turned its head all the way round to follow me, the way they do, and then turned it back. Its eyes caught the light like two pennies left in a fountain. I stood under it for a while. Nothing happened. A tug sounded downriver, and the mist came up off the water in long grey sheets, and somewhere a dog barked twice and gave up.
At the end of my round I found a feather on the bridge rail, long and banded, pale at the tip. I have put it in the logbook between the page for the nineteenth and the page for the twentieth, where nothing else has been written. Mrs Ibbotson can have her sign. I will say only that the owl was still there at dawn, and that the lamp had gone out in the night, and that somebody had left the gate open on the far side, where the path runs down to the water.
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