Black and grey owl tattoo with lace-like detailing perched on a crescent moon, on the inner forearm.

Owl perched on a crescent moon on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl with wide, round eyes and feathered patterned wings sits on top of an open crescent moon. The linework is fine and detailed, with dotwork and stippled shading in the feathers and the lace-like pattern around the eyes. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, shown on the inner forearm against a patterned black lace stocking and a wooden floor.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Owl Moon Crescent moon Feather Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moths had got into the Hollis net again, so Edith sat up with the lamp turned low and her fingers blackened from the bobbins. Half past two by the church clock, and the frame still wanted twelve yards of the Chantilly ground finished before the buyers came up from London. Out on the sill the owl sat as it always did, round-eyed and disapproving, as if the lace were its own nest and she the thief.

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Her father had called it a barn owl once, though it had never been near a barn. It came every night when the lamp was lit and never in daylight, and it hunted nothing in the room but the moths that ate the thread. Edith had stopped minding. She had started leaving it the end of her tea, a crust of bread on the ledge, and on the nights the frame ran true it would tuck its feet beneath it and watch her work.

The night the crescent moon hung low over the mill chimney, the owl dropped the thing it had been carrying all week: a curl of silver wire, bent into the shape of a sliver, which she had lost the spring her brother went to sea. She had searched the floorboards for it on her knees. Now it lay on the sill beside the bread, and the owl looked at her with its wide eyes as if to say the pattern was not finished until the wire was returned.

She threaded it through the last hole in the mesh. The lace came off the frame at dawn in one piece, a moon wound with feathers and small stars, and when the buyers unrolled it in London nobody could say where the outer edge had been mended. Edith kept the ledge clean after that. The moths never came back.