Coloured neo-traditional style flash drawing of a large-eyed owl on a branch beside red roses, butterflies and falling petals, shown on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with roses and branch design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a wide-eyed owl perched on a twisting branch, with its wings partly spread and its feathers shaded in brown, cream and purple. Three red roses sit to the left and a smaller cluster to the lower right, with two small butterflies and loose red petals filling the space around the figure. Bold outlines, soft sketchy shading and bright red and blue accents are set against a plain white background.

Neo-trad Owl Rose Branch Butterfly Petal Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl came aboard in the grey before dawn, three days out from Lisbon, and sat on the spanker boom with its wide eyes fixed on the cook's washing line. Nobody could say where it had flown from. Old Hollis, the bosun, said owls do not cross open water, so it must have risen from the bottom of the sea, and he would not have it touched.

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Pell, the cabin boy, fed it scraps of salt cod and named it Lantern, because its eyes shone blue in the dark. Every night it moved along the rail, and every morning a sprig of rose lay on the deck where it had been perched. The captain had bought those roses in a Lisbon market for his sister in Hull, and when he found the stems gone from their box he grew angry, then uneasy, then quiet.

In the calm below the Doldrums the ship lay still for six days. The water casks ran low. On the seventh night Hollis went to the rail and saw a bough of green riding the swell toward them, twisted and leafed, with a cluster of red roses clinging to one end. Lantern flew down onto it, turned its head to the south-west, and called once. Pell rowed the jolly boat out with the cook and the captain beside him, and they found a small island where roses grew wild over the rocks and fresh water ran out between the stones.

They filled every cask. When the wind came back, the owl stayed on its bough, and the captain pressed his sister's last rose into the soil as a marker. On the next passage Pell kept a sprig in his coat pocket, and when the blue eyes appeared on the rail at dusk, he simply nodded to them.