Bold black and white flash drawing of a stylised owl with large round eyes, a heart-shaped beak, outstretched wings and clawed feet on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised owl flash design

Black and grey · Flash

A simple, bold owl design shown in solid black on a white background. The owl has large round eyes, a heart-shaped beak, pointed ear tufts, outstretched wings and clawed feet. The body is left white with five small teardrop-shaped markings, and the design uses flat shapes with no shading.

Owl Bird Eye Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keep at Harrowmere had lost its roof twice before I came to count its stones, and both times the owl had moved into the north tower as if she had been waiting for the rafters to fall. I was the surveyor's man, paid by the day to measure what was left. The work suited me. Nobody asks a man who counts walls what he does with his evenings, and mine went to the owl.

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She was no ordinary bird. Her eyes were round as cartwheel hubs and her beak was cut in the shape of a heart, which Dora at the village shop said was a sign of trouble. I left bread crusts on the parapet and she left me the occasional feather. Below her perch, on the flat stone of the sill, five pale marks lay in a row like dropped seeds. I counted those too, because counting was what I was paid for.

In October the surveyor, a Mr Pemberton with a clipboard and no patience, marked the north tower for demolition. The stones were to go to a car park in Thornbury. I climbed up on the last night with a lamp and a heel of loaf, expecting to say goodbye to a bird who would not notice. The tower groaned. The owl sat on the broken sill, and when I knelt to brush away the grit I found the five marks were not paint at all but hollows worn into the stone, each one holding a little rainwater, and in the middle of them a brass key green with age.

I took the key down the stair and put it in my coat. In the morning I wrote on Pemberton's form: one tower, unsound; five stones, not to be counted. He signed it without looking up, and the owl, I like to think, watched him do it from the dark.