Black line tattoo of an owl perched on a leafy branch, shown on the inner wrist and forearm of a person.

Owl perched on a branch on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl sits on a thin branch with two leaves, drawn in bold black outline. The wings and chest are filled with simple hatched and scalloped marks, and the eyes are wide and rounded. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the design sits centred on the wrist against a plain skin background.

Forearm Owl Branch Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick with gull muck, and sit where the lamp can reach you. You want to hear about Old Mags Tully and the owl that wouldn't leave her kitchen window? Right. Her husband Dickon had gone out on the Pilchard Queen the winter the herring failed, and the boat came home without him, and Mags sat up every night after that with the candle lit and the shutters open. She said she was waiting for a sign, and the village said she was waiting for a drowned man to knock, which is cruel talk, but people are cruel when they're frightened.

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Then one February a barn owl came and perched on the drying line outside her window, on the thin bit of ash branch that Dickon had nailed up for the gulls to sit on. Two little leaves still clung to it. Mags swore the bird looked at her the way Dickon used to, sideways and patient, as if she'd said something foolish and he was too kind to point it out. Every evening it came back, and every evening she set out a dish of cold fish and talked to it like a lodger who paid no rent.

When the spring tide came up the harbour steps the next March, the owl flew off over the wall and was gone before dawn. And that same morning a lad from the lifeboat house came up the lane carrying Dickon's tin lantern, dented and salt-white, which had washed into the reeds at the mouth of the creek. Mags took it, turned it over, and found his initials scratched under the handle. She laughed until she coughed. Make of that what you like. I make nothing of it. I only know she stopped leaving the candle lit.