Traditional-style flash design of a grey owl with yellow eyes perched on a compass, framed by dark red roses and leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl perched on a compass with roses

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a grey owl with large yellow eyes and an orange beak, perched on the rim of a compass. Dark red roses and green leaves frame the owl in a rounded shape against a pale background. The bold outlines and shaded grey feathers are combined with flat areas of red, yellow and green colour.

Traditional Owl Compass Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift on Ward Six stalls between floors at ten past three, and you are the only one on nights who knows the trick to coaxing it, a knock with the heel of your hand low on the panel. Nobody else bothers with the old lift anymore. The new block has its bright arrows and its laminated signs, but the old wing still runs on memory, and you have learned its corridors the way a sailor learns a coast.

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Dorothy Quayle, the night sister, gave you her father's brass compass at handover in March, saying a porter who could not find the linen store at four in the morning ought to have something to point him. It has a painted card face with N, E, S and W, and a lid that snaps shut with a sound like a cough. You keep it in your breast pocket beside your pen. Between rounds you walk the long corridor from the sluice to the chapel, and the needle, when you stop to check, always drifts north past the fire door, though the fire door faces nothing you can name.

Around half past four the owl comes. It sits on the sill of the window at the end of the corridor, where the security lamp throws its light across the car park, and it watches you open the compass as though it has been waiting for you to get the bearing right. Its eyes are wide and yellow in the lamplight. 'Don't tell anyone,' you say, and it doesn't.

When the buzzer for bay three goes at five, you step out into the grey start of the day and realise you haven't needed the compass at all. You know the way now. You snap the lid shut with its small cough and leave the owl to its window.