Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a steampunk owl in a top hat, with a clock face and gears, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Steampunk owl with clock and gears on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A steampunk owl wearing a top hat with an eye motif sits in front of a flower and above a clock face with gears. Bold black outlines define the feathers, hat and dial, with shading in blues, teals, reds and yellows. The design fills a vertical outer thigh composition, with the owl's body running down into the clock at the bottom.

Neo-trad Thigh Owl Top hat Eye Clock Gear Flower Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quarrie had kept the clocks of Hollin Road station for nineteen years, and in all that time the owl had never once been late. It was clockwork, brass and blued steel, and it sat on the signal box sill with its top hat tilted over one eye. Each night at eleven it turned its head, opened its beak with a click, and let a printed card slide out onto the sill with the first train's time on it.

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The trouble came on a wet Thursday in the shape of a new stationmaster, Alderman Pryce, who wanted the owl broken up for scrap to pay for a coal stove in the waiting room. Mabel argued that the thing had kept the 5.40 to Leeds running through two floods and a strike. Pryce said it was an ornament and she was a clerk with opinions. She said nothing more. That night she unscrewed the spring from its chest and the escapement wheel from its clock, and wrapped both in oilcloth inside her coat.

By morning the owl's beak stayed shut. The signal arm, which the owl had worked for nineteen years through a brass linkage, stuck at danger. The 5.40 came round the bend with its whistle already blowing, and the driver hauled on his brake so hard the carriages sang. Pryce ran the length of the platform in his shirtsleeves and found Mabel in the box, the spring cradled in her apron like a bird's egg.

"Put it back," he said, out of breath. "Whatever you want. Put it back."

She did, while the engine hissed beside them. When she wound the key, the owl turned its head, opened its beak with a click, and a card slid out onto the sill. Pryce picked it up and read it aloud, slowly, the way a man reads something he would rather not have to believe: "5.40. On time."