Tattoo of six owls perched on two branches with green leaves, in grey shading with coloured eyes, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Six owls on branches across a shoulder blade

Back · Mixed · Photo

Two larger owls sit on an upper branch and four smaller owls hang from a lower branch, linked by thin vertical lines. The owls are drawn with soft grey shading and bold outlines, with green, blue and pink touches on the eyes and green leaves along the branches. The design sweeps diagonally across the upper back, with the branches curving towards the shoulder.

Back Owl Branch Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Along the dust road out of Sallow Wells, where the ground had turned the colour of old bread, one ash tree still kept its leaves, and on its highest limb sat two owls who had never agreed about the weather. The older one, Edda, could tell a storm three days out from the way the mice stopped running. The younger one, Pell, only ever said it would be hot. Ruth at the crossroads pump said they had been arguing since before her mother was born, and that the argument was the only thing in the valley still growing.

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Four owlets hatched in the spring of the long drought, too small to fly and too hungry to wait. Pell wanted them carried up to the barn roof where the cats could not reach. Edda said the barn had no water and the roof had no shade. So she gathered silk from the spiders under the pump house, spun it into thread with her beak, and tied one strand to each owlet and the other end to the low branch, so they swung in the hot air like lanterns and could not fall.

Travellers on the road slowed to stare. A drover with a cart of salt asked why anyone would hang young birds out in the open like washing. Pell told him they were learning the wind. Edda told him nothing, because she was busy listening for rain.

The rain came in October, sideways and sudden, and the threads held. When the owlets finally flew they went off in four directions, and the next spring the low branch put out new leaves exactly where the silk had been tied, green as the eyes of the owl who had been right about the weather for once.