Black ink drawing of a stylised owl with large patterned eyes and a blackwork wing, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised owl in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing owl with a large, round head, wide patterned eyes and a small beak. The wings are filled with leaf-shaped feathers outlined in bold black, with dots, hatching and small dashes inside, while the body is covered in fine scale-like curves. The drawing uses only black ink on white paper, with no shading or greys.

Blackwork Owl Eye Feather Scale Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at St Aldric's had a rule about the owl, and the rule was that you did not feed it. It came to the ward window on the third floor every night after the last trolley had gone down, and it sat on the sill with its feathers pulled tight and looked in at the beds. Nobody remembered when it started. Old Mrs Pryce said it had been there when her husband was brought in, and he had gone home, so the owl was a good sign and the porters were grateful for it.

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Nurse Ilse Gwynne did not believe in signs. She had come on shift at ten with a cold cup of tea and forty-one charts to check, and by two in the morning she had checked them twice. The bell over bay four rang. She went. A man in the third bed was sitting up with his hand pressed to his chest, and when she reached him he said the owl had told him to wait for her.

She laughed at that, and then she stopped laughing, because the owl had turned its head all the way round and was watching the monitor above his bed, where the line had begun to wander. She pressed the call button and started the compressions before anyone came running. Afterwards the registrar said it had been a near thing.

Ilse sat on the sill in the grey hour before dawn, with the owl a foot from her elbow. It blinked slowly, one patterned eye and then the other, and let her be.