Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketches of owl heads

Black and grey · Flash

Three owl head designs are drawn in pencil on pale paper, with the largest in the foreground and two smaller versions above and to the left. Each owl has wide, staring eyes, a pointed brow and detailed feather markings, with hatching and fine shading across the face and plumage. The image is black and grey only and shows the sketches in a loose, unframed arrangement.

Owl Feather Eye Sketch Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, and don't fidget, because the owls are watching. You think I'm making that up. Ask anyone who crossed at the Vellin ford in the winter of the big flood. There were three of them on the old toll post, one on the lintel and two on the gatepost, and they never once blinked while the guards went through the lorries.

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Their brows were sharp as a clerk's pencil, and every feather on them was drawn in fine hatching, the way a man draws when he has nothing to do but count. The night guard, a boy called Tomasz Renner with ink on his cuffs, swore they were carved. Then he swore they had moved. He sketched them on the back of a ration form to show his sergeant, three heads, the largest in front, and the sergeant tore the form in half and kept the bigger owl for himself.

That's the part nobody tells right. The sergeant folded his half into his breast pocket, and the next morning the crossing was quiet. Nobody was stopped who shouldn't have been. Every bus got through with its passengers, the river ran high but the bridge held, and Tomasz said the owls had been watching the wrong men all along. The sergeant laughed at him until the day he retired.

So when you cross, look up. If the eyes are staring, you are being counted, and that is nothing to be afraid of. Now give me your papers, and mind the step.