Small solid black owl and heart tattoo with a heart-shaped cutout on the inner wrist, shown beside a larger version of the design.

Small owl and heart on wrist

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black tattoo on the inner wrist shows a stylised owl-like form with a heart-shaped area of negative space near the top. The right-hand panel shows the same design enlarged on a plain background, beside a text panel titled Owl Symbolism that lists meanings for the owl. The solid black fill is simple and bold, with no shading or colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the wind has found the broken shutters again, and it always comes in hungry at this hour. You want the tale of Harrowmere? Then mind the fire and hush. The keep has no roof now, only the stone ribs of it, and the owl that lives in the chapel arch there is older than any lord who ever climbed those stairs.

Keep reading

Lord Aldous Vane kept a silver mask on a hook beside his bed, and he wore a smile for everyone who climbed to his hall. The steward's girl, Wenna, carried his candles and his lies up the same stair every morning. She noticed that the owl never blinked at the mask. It watched him from the arch with its heart-shaped hollow turned toward the window, as if it could see the face under the metal.

One night the lord sent Wenna down to the cellar for wine, and then he bolted the door. Black water rose through the flagstones. She heard his voice above her, bright and kind, telling the village she had run off with the tithe silver. Nobody came. Then a shadow dropped past the grate, soft as a fallen glove, and the owl hooked its claws into the iron and tore it loose from the rotten mortar. Wenna climbed out after it and up the stair, into the hall where the lord sat grinning at his own reflection.

He saw her face and his smile slipped. The owl settled on the back of his chair and looked at him the way it looked at mice in the rubble, patient and certain. By dawn the lord was gone, and the mask lay on the hall floor with a heart-shaped dent pressed into its brow. Wenna still keeps the keys. And when the owl calls from the arch, the old ones say, a liar in the valley had best check his candle.

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