Colour tattoo of an owl with pink, teal and black watercolour-style splashes across the outer thigh.

Owl with watercolour splashes on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stern owl with pale blue eyes and a hooked beak fills the upper thigh, its face and feathers rendered in pink, magenta and black. Loose black speckles, drips and teal and pink brush-like splashes spread out from the figure, with softer shading on the feathers and sharp dark strokes at the lower edge. The photo is taken straight on, with the leg filling most of the frame and a patterned fabric visible at the top.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Joan,

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You will think I have gone soft, but there is an owl on the chapel roof opposite the exchange and it has been looking at me every night this week. Mr Pryce says it is only a tawny, and that they come down into the town when the fields flood. It does not look like a tawny to me. It has pale blue eyes, the colour of skimmed milk at the bottom of a jug, and it sits so still that I thought it was carved until it turned its head right round to watch the lamplighter go by.

The sunsets here are pink and smeared, you would laugh, and the rain has been coming sideways off the hill in dark streaks, so the whole street looks splashed with paint by the time I walk home at six. Mrs Ledger swears the owl was on that roof the week her husband went to France and again the week he came back, so it must mean something. I told her signs are for people with nothing to do between calls.

Last night the line to Bristol went dead at quarter to three and I sat with the cords in my lap, listening to nothing at all. Then I saw the owl drop off the chapel roof without a sound. It went straight through the lamplight and out over the allotments. This morning there was a feather on the exchange step, black at the tip and rust at the root, and I have pinned it inside my locker.

Write back and tell me whether Dad's cough is better. I am not going to ask about the dance at the Corn Exchange. I know you went.

Love, Edie

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