Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an owl perched above a pocket watch, with cherry blossom branches and a crescent moon, drawn in neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl, pocket watch and blossom design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing an owl with a detailed face and feathered wings, holding a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a beaded chain. Cherry blossom sprigs and a crescent moon surround the owl, and a ribbon curls around its body. The shading is soft grey graphite on a sepia paper background, with fine hatching on the feathers and clock face.

Neo-trad Botanical Owl Pocket watch Clock Moon Blossom Bead Ribbon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at ten past eleven, and Mr Pryce swore on his mother's grave that the owl had done it. "It sits on the signal wire and looks at you," he said, rubbing his bald patch with a handkerchief. "Owls know what time it is. Nobody else round here does."

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I took the watch from him anyway, because the chain was his last link with the railway. He had carried it since the strike, when his father was turned off the line at Crewe and never got another post. The beads on the chain were cold and fine, like a rosary, and the silver case had a hairline crack running across the Roman numerals. I held it up to the lamp in the signal box. Outside, the cherry trees along the cutting had come into blossom overnight, pale as paper in the moonlight, and a barn owl sat on the wire with its face turned perfectly towards us.

"Give it here," I said, and wound the crown until it resisted. The second hand jolted, then ran. Mr Pryce let out a breath as if he had been holding it since the war.

The owl dropped off the wire without a sound, took a sprig of blossom in its talons and was gone over the goods yard. I never learnt where it went. But that night Mr Pryce set his own pocket watch by mine, and the next morning the 6.40 pulled out of Sallow Cross on time, the first thing that had happened on time in our town since the strike.