Coloured drawing of an owl perched on branches beside a pocket watch on a chain, with a pale moon behind, in a bold neo-traditional style.

Owl with pocket watch and chain

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing on paper shows a horned owl perched among bare branches, with a pocket watch hanging from its talon on a looped chain. A pale moon sits behind the bird. The owl has bold dark outlines, red-rimmed eyes and layered feather detail in teal, grey, brown and red coloured pencil, and the composition fills a tall portrait sheet.

Neo-trad Owl Pocket watch Chain Branches Moon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl had been roosting in the dead ash above the Pembrey pear rows since August began, and by the last week of the month we had stopped pretending it was a nuisance. It took the mice from the windfall heap and sat very still while we picked, turning its head to watch us with those red-rimmed eyes, as if we were the ones being counted.

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Old Walter Haig kept his father's pocket watch on a chain across his waistcoat, and it had not ticked in eleven years. He would not have it mended. "Stopped is stopped," he said. "It knows what it's about." On the Thursday evening he came down the lane at a stumble, the chain trailing from his fist like a broken bridle, shouting that the owl had taken the watch clean off the nail in the packing shed, where he had hung it while he sorted the Conference pears.

We found the bird on the top bough of the ash, the watch dangling from one talon and the chain looped through the branches like a line of washing. The moon was coming up pale over the hedge. Walter stood below with his hands open, not reaching, and the owl looked down at him for a long while.

I climbed. It let me come close enough to see the watch face, Roman numerals worn to ghosts, the hands stuck at a quarter past nine. When I held out my palm the owl stepped onto it and loosened its foot, and the watch dropped into my hand, still warm from its grip. I carried it down and gave it to Walter. He held it to his ear and, for the first time in eleven years, heard it tick. Behind us the owl lifted off without a sound, and somewhere in the rows a single pear dropped.