Small fine line owl tattoo in blue-grey ink on the outer ankle of a pale leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small owl tattoo on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl with large round eyes and a flat brow sits on the lower leg near the ankle. It is drawn in thin, dark blue-grey outlines with light shading on the body. The tattoo is centred in a plain close-up photo against a dark floor.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the third from the top is loose, same as it was in 1987, and nobody in this hall has had the decency to fix it. Sit down, the lot of you. You're not too grand to be told off by an owl.

Keep reading

Every school has a ghost, and ours was a barn owl who lived behind the clock in the bell tower. Mrs Pardoe, who taught us Latin and frightened us in equal measure, said he was the school's conscience. He had round eyes and one flat grey brow drawn down like a headmaster who'd read your report before you did. Nobody was allowed up the tower. Naturally, that was the first thing Dennis Ferris and I did the week before the summer exams.

We got as far as the ladder. The owl sat on the beam and stared at us so long that Dennis started apologising to it, out loud, in full sentences. I laughed until I had to hold the rail. Then the owl shifted, a fat grey pellet dropped between my shoes, and I screamed loud enough that Mrs Pardoe came running with a torch.

She didn't send us to the head. She sat down on the stairs, looked up at the beam and said, "He only wants what we all want, a bit of quiet and somebody to stop shouting." Then she sent us home, and the next morning the clock showed the right time for the first time in a decade.

Dennis is gone now, and the tower has been knocked down for flats. But when this hall goes quiet I still catch that slow blink from the beam, and I still sit up straight.

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