Black ink drawing of a tattoo design showing an owl with a skull above it, a moth, a crescent moon, antlers and crossed bones, rendered in dotwork and linework.

Owl, skull and moth tattoo design drawing

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a tattoo design on tracing paper. An owl with a skull set above its head sits at the centre, with a moth and crescent moon above, antlers at the top, and crossed bones tied at the owl's chest. Shading is built from dense stippled dots and fine hatching, with lotus-like shapes beside the wings, and the image is in black ink only.

Dotwork Owl Skull Moth Crescent moon Antler Bone Feather Lotus Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent in the field at Scarrow had torn along its seam before the owl came, and Mabel Trusk, who had mended canvas for the Gorse Brothers Travelling Show for forty winters, said that was how you knew it was a bad season. The lions had gone to a zoo in Leeds. The strongman sold his boots to a rag man in Thirsk. Only the bird stayed, perched on the centre pole above the ring, looking down with eyes like two pale coins.

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Nobody had bought it. It had come in on the back of the moth-coloured wagon, a barn owl the colour of ash, and when the ringmaster tried to shoo it off with a broom it turned its head all the way round and looked at the empty seats. The children said it counted them. Mabel said it counted what was left. Each night after the last act it dropped to the sawdust and walked, slow as a deacon, to the old banner stitched above the ticket booth, the skull and crossed bones faded to the colour of weak tea, and it sat there until the lamps guttered out.

On the eleventh night Ezra Gorse went out with a lantern and found the bird on the banner with a bone in its talons, a long white shin scrubbed clean, carved along its length with the name of every town the show had ever played. He held out his hand. The owl dropped the bone into his palm and lifted off over the caravans and the dead elms, towards a crescent moon hanging like a fishhook above the moor.

The next evening there was a queue at the gate, forty people in good coats who had walked from the village with their own chairs. Ezra kept the bones in a biscuit tin under the ticket table. By midsummer the big top was full every night, and Mabel swore that on the centre pole, when the lamps went down, the owl sat with its feathers pressed flat and counted the heads, and was satisfied.