Black and grey realism tattoo of an owl with spread wings on the centre of a torso, with hands resting on the sides of the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with spread wings on the chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a tattoo showing a front-facing owl with wide spread wings, centred on the chest below the bust. The owl's head has fine scale-like shading and detailed eyes, while the feathers use layered shading and bold outlines. The image is monochrome, with hands with dark painted nails pressing against the sides of the torso.

Realism Chest Owl Wing Feather Eye Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter had kept the telephone exchange over Market Lane since the war, and in all that time nobody had ever seen her sleep. The switchboard sat under the eaves of the old corn exchange, and at night the only other living thing in the building was the barn owl that lived in the rafters above the stairs. Its face was the colour of wet sand, its eyes fixed on whoever came up the steps, and when the wind turned the lamp in the window it would spread its wings wide enough to fill the doorway.

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The trouble began in February, when the lines to Stamford went dead one after another. Engineers from the Post Office came out with their ladders and their cigarettes and found nothing wrong with the cables. Mrs Pargeter sat with her plugs and her ledger and listened to the hiss, and when the owl dropped off its beam and landed on the desk beside the ledger, she decided to follow it.

It led her down the back stairs, past the coal store, to a cupboard where someone had hidden a box of letters tied with string. Most were from a grocer's son who had gone to Korea and never written again, addressed to a girl across the road who had since married a bus driver. Each one had been opened and read, and each had a small pencilled mark in the corner, a ring of tiny strokes like feathers. The owl sat on the box and watched her, unblinking.

She did not post them. She took them across the road to the girl, now Mrs Hallam, who wept over her kitchen table and then laughed at the mark in the corner. By morning the lines to Stamford were working again, and the owl had gone back to the rafters, its wings folded tight as a closed fan.