Small shaded owl perched on a leafy branch, tattooed on the outer ankle in black and grey.

Owl perched on a branch on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl with large round eyes and a feathered head sits on a thin branch with three leaves. The owl is shaded in soft greys and brown-grey wash, with fine detailing on the eyes and wings. The design is placed low on the ankle with the branch curving across the lower part of the frame, against a plain skin background.

Ankle Owl Branch Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had closed the pass above Hebden Stoop for nine days, and the inn at Cold Harrow had taken in eleven travellers: a drover with two lurchers, a tinker mending pans by the fire, and a widow who would not say where she was bound. On the tenth morning a brown owl sat on the bare ash branch outside the kitchen window, round-eyed and unmoving. Mrs Ansty, who had kept the house since her husband went through the ice, set down her ladle and said that it had come to count them.

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Her grandson Tom, who was nine and believed only in things he could throw, asked how many it had counted so far. The owl turned its head a full half circle, the way owls do, and looked at each of them in turn through the glass. When it reached the widow it stopped, and the widow went white and left her bread unfinished on the board.

That night she came down with a lamp and asked for the key to the old cold room where the winter stores were kept. Mrs Ansty gave it to her without a word. In the morning the widow was gone, her footprints already filled with snow, and on the hearth lay a single grey feather and a coin of a king nobody living remembered.

The owl stayed on the ash until the thaw. Tom said it always faced the pass, as if waiting for someone to come back up it. Mrs Ansty laid an extra bowl at the table every night for a year and never once explained why.