Black and grey dotwork drawing of a symmetrical owl with an eye on its brow, an hourglass across its chest and clockwork gears at the base, shown as a tattoo design.

Owl with hourglass and clockwork gears

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing owl with large staring eyes, a third eye on its forehead and a bow tie at the throat, its wings spread down the sides. Below it sits an hourglass with the letters alpha and omega, flanked by a cluster of gears and a central eye. The drawing uses fine stippled dotwork and hatched linework in black ink on a plain white background, with a symmetrical composition.

Dotwork Owl Hourglass Gear Eye Wing Feather Bow tie Clockwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had sat on the gatepost for three nights before Nell thought to count the apples. Her grandfather's orchard ran down to the brook in forty-two rows, and every August the Bramleys dropped faster than the pickers could bag them. Now the windfalls were going soft in the long grass, and the owl watched her from the post with eyes wide as saucers, its ear tufts raised and its feathers ruffled as neatly as a waistcoat.

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Grandad had kept an hourglass in the packing shed, a squat glass on a brass frame that he turned each morning before the first van came. He said the sand was the orchard's own time, and that when the top bulb emptied the fruit would be ready to lift. Nell had thought it sentimental nonsense until the afternoon the sand stopped halfway down and would not fall.

On the third evening she carried a wooden crate to the gate and set one bruised apple on the top rail. The owl dropped down, unhurried, and took it in its talons without looking at her. Behind her in the shed, something ticked. She went back and found the glass turned on its side, the sand pouring again, and the little gears of the old press turning slow as a heartbeat with nobody near them.

She understood then what her grandfather had been measuring. She picked the rest of the windfalls herself that night, counted forty-one, and chalked the number on the shed door beneath his last entry. The owl was still on the gate at dawn, and when she went to fetch the ladder it had left one feather on the rail, black at the tip, as if to say the tally was fair.