Black and grey blackwork owl tattoo with feathered wings and floral sprigs across the upper back, with hands with black nails resting on the shoulders above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with feathered wings on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl sits centred on the upper back, with its wings spread into layered feathers and sprigs of leaves and small flowers rising on either side. The face is ornamented with mandala-like patterns and dotted shading, and the feathers use heavy solid black with fine grey detailing. The image is in black and grey, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and two hands with black nails resting near the shoulders above it.

Blackwork Botanical Back Owl Feather Wing Mandala Flower Leaves Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the Harrowgate Grand Travelling Show came down the hill road in the rain, two wagons short and one horse lame, and the owl rode on top of the lead wagon where it had ridden for forty winters. Nobody paid it any mind now. The bill posters had gone to the coast with the elephant, and the lion had been sold to a man in Carlisle who wanted a rug.

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Mother Ettie kept the owl's perch dry with a sheet of oilcloth. She said the bird had come to the show as a chick, carried in a milk churn by a tumbler who died before the wagons were painted, and that it had never once closed its eyes in daylight without a reason. Her grandson Tobias thought this was nonsense. He thought most things his grandmother said were nonsense, until the night the lamps failed on the Wicken Moor road and the wagons sat in the dark with nothing but the owl's yellow stare moving over the hedges.

Ettie climbed up with a cup of warm milk and asked the owl what it wanted. The owl opened its wings slowly, the way a painted sign unfolds on a fairground, and every feather caught a little of the moon. Tobias swore afterwards that the marks on its face moved like the lines of a map. It lifted off the wagon, circled twice, and dropped onto the road ahead, and where it landed the ruts showed clear as a dry path.

They reached the market town before dawn. By spring the show had a new ringmaster, a gatekeeper who took coins at the door, and a banner painted with a great owl whose wings reached the edges of the cloth. Ettie never told anyone the bird had been guiding them. She only left a saucer of milk on the step each evening, and in the morning it was always empty.