Large neo-traditional back tattoo of a grey owl with spread wings, with a snarling red cat head and blood drips across the lower back.

Owl with spread wings and snarling red cat on back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a grey owl with wide, shaded wings filling the upper back, its round eye and feather detail rendered in fine tonal shading. Below the owl, a snarling red cat head with bared fangs sits within the wing, with red blood dripping down beneath it. The black and grey feathers contrast with the saturated red, and the design is framed by the bare skin of the back against a dark background.

Neo-trad Realism Back Owl Wing Feather Cat Blood Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had warned Brandy the tom about the owl in the church tower, and by the time the parish learned what he had been doing to their hens, the whole of Sallow Fen had already decided he had it coming.

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Hester lived in the bell loft and kept her own accounts. Every night she watched the cat cross the dyke with a hen's warm weight in his jaws, and every night she counted it, feather by feather, the way the vicar counted the collection plate. Brandy knew she was there. He liked to sit on the lychgate in the moonlight, tail curled, and yowl up at the tower as if it were a joke he had been saving.

One November evening he went too far. He took the vicar's last speckled pullet from the coop behind the rectory and carried it along the churchyard wall, and that was where Hester was waiting, not in the tower but on the flat stone of Jonas Harle's grave, wings opened so wide the lane went dark. Brandy dropped the bird. For the first time in three winters he saw his own shadow on the wall and did not care for its shape.

They found the pullet untouched the next morning, laid neatly on the vicar's step with its neck straight. Beside it the dyke stones were streaked red, and in the drain floated one grey feather, turning slowly in the current as if it had somewhere to be. The bell in the tower rang once, though nobody had climbed up to pull the rope.