Purple cartoon owl with closed eyes perched on a black branch with pink blossoms, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleepy purple owl on a branch

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A cartoon owl with closed eyes and a rounded purple body sits on a black branch, with small pink blossoms along the left side of the branch. The owl has soft shading in lilac and darker purple, with orange feet and a yellow beak, and the bold outlines are dark grey. The tattoo sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with the crop showing the skin and part of a light fabric strap at the bottom left.

Back Owl Branch Blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Garvey had been night porter at Thornleigh Junction for eleven winters, and in all that time the owl had never once opened its eyes. It lived in the ivy above the parcels office, and the signal lads called it Mr Pinch because it always looked as if it were about to nod off mid-sentence.

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The trouble started in March, when the last southbound sleeper was held at the platform for a fault in the brake line. Passengers grumbled under the canopy. A boy in a school blazer kept asking whether the train would be gone before his mum woke up at the other end. Nell took him into the waiting room, found a tin of shortbread under the radiator, and was pouring tea from the urn when she heard a soft flutter and saw the owl had come down onto the luggage trolley. It had found a sprig of blossom caught in the wire mesh and was sitting beside it as though it had been asked to keep an eye on things.

For an hour the engineer swore at the valve and the boy fell asleep against Nell's coat. The owl did not move. Nell began to think it was simply too lazy to fly, until a rat slipped out from under the platform edge and the owl's head turned, one eye clicking open, sharp as a signal lamp, until the rat thought better of it and vanished back into the dark.

The brake was fixed at quarter past three. The sleeper pulled out with its lights swinging across the points, and the boy's mum was never told how close he had come to being left behind. Nell wrote in the night log: All on board. Mr Pinch dozing, as usual.