Two people in black tank tops embrace, showing black and grey blackwork sleeves: a skull and owl on her upper arm, and a grim reaper with a scythe on his upper arm and wings on his forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl, skull and grim reaper sleeves

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man and a woman stand close together against a dark background, both with full sleeve tattoos on their arms. Her arm shows a skull with an owl's face and a moth above it, while his shows a skeletal grim reaper holding a scythe on the upper arm, with feathered wings continuing down the forearm. The shading is fine and detailed, built from dense hatching and solid black areas, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Shoulder Skull Owl Moth Grim reaper Skeleton Scythe Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had sat on the north wall of Hollin Garden since the first hard frost, and it did not go after the mice in the bean rows. Old Tam Reddaway noticed on the third morning, when he came out with his spade and found the bird's eyes already on him, round and yellow as two pennies laid on a grave. He told it to shoo. It did not shoo.

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That evening the reaper came up the lane, thin as a rake handle, with a scythe folded over one shoulder and wings like wet rook feathers. Tam had made a bargain with him in March, when his chest had filled like a bucket: one season of growing in exchange for the thing he loved most. Tam had given him the name of the garden. The reaper had smiled at that, the way a man smiles at a joke he has heard before, and said the garden would keep.

Tam spent the summer on his knees. Sweet peas climbed the wall. Each night a moth came to the lamp in the shed, and the owl took it and left the wings on the path. The reaper walked the rows with his scythe unused, asking after each plant by name, and Tam answered every one. By August the reaper had stopped asking.

On the last warm evening of the year Tam cut the final bloom, a single purple pea, and set it on the wall beside the owl. The reaper came to collect and found him sitting there with his breath easy, shelling a bean into his palm. The reaper said he had not yet been given the thing Tam loved most. Tam said a garden was not a thing, it was a promise to come back in spring. The reaper tucked the pea into his coat and went off down the lane with the owl flying ahead of him, and Tam went in to bed.