Black and grey steampunk owl wearing a top hat and smoking a pipe, with gears and smoke, tattooed on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Steampunk owl in top hat on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl wearing a top hat and a goggle-style monocle smokes a pipe, with a round goggle lens and mechanical gears worked into its body. Smoke curls around the head and up past the top hat, and the scene is built from fine shading and highlights. The piece is entirely in black and grey ink and fills the upper arm and shoulder area of the photograph.

Upper arm Shoulder Owl Top hat Monocle Pipe Smoke Gear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who has to climb the bank at the lock with the windlass, because the cook's knee has gone and the owl will not leave the wheelhouse until the tide is right. Old Mr Quarrie, who owns the Constance Ebb, calls the owl Mister Tallow, though nobody on the cut can say where he came from. He sits on the brass-rimmed stool with his top hat tipped against the rain, the goggle lens screwed over one eye, and smokes a clay pipe that never seems to go out.

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Tonight the river is high and brown, and the lock gates groan like ship's timbers. You ask him why he keeps the little gears set into his chest, the ones that tick when he breathes. He takes the pipe out, blows a ring of smoke that unspools past the brim of his hat, and says the gears are only a record. Every lock he has worked, every bargeman he has got through in the dark, is written there in teeth and springs.

When the gates swing open the barge lurches and the lamps slide out over black water. Mister Tallow lifts his lens and studies you for a long moment, the way a clockmaker studies a part that will not seat. Then he taps the pipe on the rail and nods downstream. Steer by the third light, he says, the one that doesn't move. You find it, the only thing on the whole river standing still, and the smoke from his pipe drifts towards it as though it already knows the way home.