Colour tattoo of an owl with a house-roof head and pink bow tie on the upper arm, framed by faint geometric lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with house roof on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of an owl sits on the outer upper arm of a person wearing a grey sleeveless top. The owl's head is topped by a pitched roof with a small window, and its body is filled with blue, yellow, pink and brown, with a pink bow tie and feathered wings. Thin coloured and grey lines and rectangular outlines run around the design, giving it a loose, illustrative feel.

Geometric Upper arm Owl House Window Bow tie Feather Geometric line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told three times this week that the owl must leave the chapter house eaves before the visitor from the diocese arrives, and each time you have answered that she was nesting under that roof before the lead was laid, which is true. Brother Anselm says a bird in a holy place is a bad look, though he says it while sucking a bruised thumb from trying to unhook the ladder. The pink bow tie was Brother Piers's doing, cut from the spare ribbon of the Lent altar frontal. He swears she allowed it. You have never seen her allow anything.

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At night you work in the scriptorium with one candle, copying the rent roll into the fair book. Eleven hens from the Haddon holding. Two cartloads of peat from the fen men, who never pay in peat when they can pay in promises. A widow's strip of meadow that reverts to the house when she dies, which she has been doing slowly for nine years. The owl sits on the sill of the one narrow window, her face the colour of old bread, and watches the pen move. Every so often a feather drifts down and lands on the wet ink, and you leave it there, because it seems rude to brush it off.

On the last night before the visitor, you climb up with the sack and the lamp and find the eaves empty. She has gone to the bell rope in the tower, where she sits with her head turned to you as if you are the one who is late. The chapter house roof is only a roof again. In the fair book, beneath the widow's strip, you write in the margin: Received in lieu of tithe, one owl, in good order. Then you prop the shutter open a hand's width so she can come and go as she pleases.