Black line drawing of a horned owl with spread wings holding a scroll banner with script lettering, shown as a traditional-style tattoo design on paper.

Owl with spread wings and script banner

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a horned owl with wide, feathered wings, clawed feet gripping a branch or perch, and a round emblem on its chest. A ribbon banner across the wings carries cursive script that reads as "Time goes by" and "Life goes on", with curled scroll ends on both sides. The fine, even black linework is drawn on a pale translucent sheet with no colour or shading.

Neo-trad Owl Wing Banner Script Scroll Feather Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls have started, so you carry the wicker basket down the rows before the wasps wake up properly. Your uncle Ned says the Kingston Blacks are ready when the stalks come away with a twist, and you are not to pull them off like a cork. The orchard runs down to the brook in forty-odd trees, most of them older than the farmhouse roof, and every one has a name chalked on a tin tag in his square capitals.

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The owl lives in the far corner, in the hollow of the old Bramley that the storm split in March. You have only ever seen it at dusk, a pale face turning on a branch as if someone had called its name. Ned says it was there before him and will be there after, and that the trick is to stop expecting it to look at you. You try that. You stand under the split tree with the basket on your hip and the light going copper through the leaves, and you do not look up.

When the owl finally drops from the branch, it does not hunt. It opens its wings over the grass, wide enough to cover the whole row of drying apples, and glides past you towards the brook without a sound. You understand, watching it go, that Ned did not mean the bird was waiting for you. He meant that the orchard does not stop for anyone, and you can either keep picking or stand still and be left behind.

That evening you write the day's count on the back of the feed-shed door, under his hand: forty-one sacks, two trees bare. Underneath, in your own careful hand, you add a line for the owl. Ned reads it at breakfast, nods once, and says nothing, which from him is a full letter. Time goes by, you think, and you pick up the basket anyway.