Pencil sketch of a barn owl with spread wings, laurel sprig, arrows and an ornate hourglass, drawn as a neo-traditional tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Owl with wings and hourglass design sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink line drawing of a barn owl with wings spread wide, set against a laurel sprig and two arrows. An ornate hourglass with scrolled supports sits below the owl, with the wing feathers shaded in light grey pencil. The design is mostly black and grey, with faint red underdrawing visible in places, and it is composed as a large sprawling piece.

Neo-trad Owl Wing Feather Hourglass Laurel Arrow Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour gets into everything before the shutters go up, and by four in the morning I've stopped brushing it off my forearms. Ours is the only light on Tanner Row at that hour, so the barn owl from the church tower has taken to sitting on the bin lid out back, watching me through the grille as if I owe her rent.

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Gran left me the brass hourglass with the bakery. It stands on the shelf above the proving cupboard, its scrolled legs gone green at the joints, and she used it for boiling eggs and for the long rise of her rye. The sand runs out in exactly eleven minutes. I have never trusted it to be right, but I have never let it lie unturned either. The owl seems to know this. Every time I flip it she shifts on the lid and blinks, slow as a magistrate.

On Tuesday the grille was left open. I came in with the first sack and found her on the proving shelf, wings half folded, sitting dead centre beside the hourglass as though she'd been hired to keep it honest. I didn't shoo her. I told her the rye wanted another ten minutes, and she looked at me the way Gran used to, and I took that as agreement.

When the sand finished I turned the glass, and she lifted off without a sound, out under the shutter into a sky going the colour of weak tea. The first loaves came out crusted and loud. I wrote OPEN on the chalkboard in flour, then wiped it off with my sleeve, because there was nobody yet to read it.