Small owl tattoo on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small owl with wide eyes and feather detail sits on the back of a hand, between the knuckles of the ring and middle fingers. The linework is fine and mostly unshaded, with light hatching on the body and wings. The photograph is black and white, and partial lettering tattoos are visible on the adjacent fingers, with a beaded bracelet on the wrist.

Fine line Hand Owl Script Bracelet Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come off the estuary at four and settled over Tanner's Yard as if it meant to stay. Ada Pryce pulled the last crate of mackerel under the awning and counted the day into her biscuit tin: forty-one pounds in coin, eleven in notes gone soft at the corners, and a hook of tarnished silver she hadn't yet decided what to do with. Above her, on the iron bracket where the market clock had stopped in 1962, the owl shifted its weight and turned its head the whole way round to watch her.

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Nobody else at the yard had ever seen it come down. Old Mr Carrow said it was the clock's ghost, and the lads on the bins swore it was a tawny from the churchyard limes. Ada, who fed it heel ends of kipper every Thursday, said nothing, because talk of the owl only made the stallholders look at her the way they looked at the weather. On the Saturday the tin vanished from under the counter. She found the lid bent back and the coins gone, and a grey feather lying across the scales.

She went after the boy she'd seen loitering by the gate, down Kettle Lane and along the canal towpath, the rain thick as wool under the lamps. The owl came off the bracket before she reached the bridge and went ahead of her, low and quiet, never more than a few yards from the boy's shoulder, until he stopped under the arch by the boatyard and looked up and saw it. He dropped the tin on the wet cobbles and ran.

Next morning the tin sat square on the step of her caravan, lid shut, every penny inside. Beside it lay one more feather. Up on the bracket above the stalls the owl was asleep with its eyes closed, which Ada had never once seen it do. She counted the coins twice anyway.