Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a thigh showing an owl on a branch with pink blossoms, a pocket watch and a monarch butterfly.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl, pocket watch and butterfly on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo on the outer thigh combines a cartoon-style owl perched on a branch with pink blossoms, a realistic open pocket watch and a monarch butterfly. The owl and blossoms use bold outlines and flat fills, while the watch and butterfly have soft shading and highlights. Blues, oranges, pinks and yellows dominate the composition, which is arranged in a diagonal from the upper owl down to the watch and butterfly.

Neo-trad Realism Thigh Owl Cherry blossom Branch Pocket watch Butterfly Monarch butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten to four the corridor on Ward 9 hums the way it always does, and you are the only one awake who doesn't need a torch. The owl on the staff noticeboard has been there since Halloween, a paper thing with yellow card eyes that a child drew in felt-tip. You take the observation chart from the clipboard and tick the boxes in pencil, because the pen has run dry again.

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Bed six belongs to the man who keeps asking what time it is. You tell him three fifty-two, and four minutes later he asks again, and he nods as though you have given him news. His pocket watch lies on the locker with its lid open, its hands still on the hour his wife was discharged. Nobody has the heart to wind it. You don't either, though you think about it at every round.

At half four a moth finds the light over the sluice room, and then a monarch, somehow lost from the garden and blundering against the glass. You open the window a crack. Out it goes, orange over the car park, and you watch it climb past the lamp posts until the sky above the multi-storey starts to lighten at the edges.

By the time the day staff come in with their coffees, bed six is asking for his wife again, and you tell him she'll be in at nine, which is nearly true. Before handover you wind the watch, just once, and set it on the locker beside his hand. The owl would have approved, you think, or it would have blinked once and gone back to sleep.