Traditional style tattoo of an owl with spread wings, stars, an eye in a box, flowers and a crescent moon on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with crescent moon on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl with outspread wings sits at the centre, surrounded by stars, a cloud shape, a crescent moon with red drips, an eye inside a yellow box and red and green flowers. The bold black outlines are filled with flat red, yellow, green and grey shading, with dotted detailing on the owl's chest. The design fills the upper arm diagonally against a brick wall and a green background.

Traditional Upper arm Owl Moon Crescent moon Star Eye Flower Wing Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came to Harker's Lea the winter the pit flooded and nobody would go down. It sat on the chapel roof with its wings held out like a coat being dried, and every night it looked at the village with a gold eye that did not blink. The old men said it was the night-bird that counted the miners back up the shaft, and they were not wrong, for it was the only thing in the valley that kept its own tally.

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Mary Ash kept the lamp house at the top of the bank. She had a yellow tin box with a painted eye on the lid, where she put the names of men who had gone below and not come up, and she read them out to the owl at the turn of each shift. The owl never answered. But one morning in February the moon hung over the slag heaps thin as a fingernail, and there were three drops of red on its lower horn, and Mary knew the water had reached the old seam.

She went down with a rope tied to the winch and a boy called Tobias Greave holding the handle. Forty feet in, the lamp guttered and she heard wings, soft and deliberate, moving ahead of her in the dark. She followed them. They led her to a gallery where five men sat on the rock with their backs to the wall, dry as bread, waiting for someone to tell them the hour.

They came up one at a time on the rope. When the last boot cleared the shaft, Tobias looked back at the village and saw the owl lift off the chapel roof and settle on the lamp house, pleased, like a clerk ticking off a list. Mary took the yellow box down from its nail and wrote five names on the lid in pencil, and this time she crossed out none of them.