Colour tattoo of three cartoon owls perched on a brown branch with green leaves, placed on the shoulder.

Three owls on a branch on the shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Three owls of decreasing size sit side by side on a brown branch that stretches across the skin. The owls have shaded brown and rust plumage, large round eyes and simple outlined features, and the branch has small green leaves along its length. The design is shown at an angle across the shoulder with soft skin tone around it.

Shoulder Owl Branch Leaf Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother always sat at the thick end of the branch, where it bent over the net loft roof in Porthkerran, and she counted the boats back in by their lamps. Father took the middle, a little lower, where the sea wind came up the lane and flattened his feathers. I had the tip, which was the thinnest part and the greenest, with leaves no bigger than a thumbnail that rattled whenever anyone landed.

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The summer I was big enough to sit with them, the boats came back short. Only four lamps came round the harbour wall instead of six, and Mother stopped counting halfway through the second. Nobody said anything. Father shuffled along the branch until his shoulder touched hers, and the wood dipped under the two of them so that I felt it in my own feet. I understood then that a branch is only as strong as the weight sitting on it together.

Before dawn I flew down to the slipway and found Eli Vosper asleep under an upturned punt, a dog's rope knotted in his fist. I hooted once, the way Mother had taught me, until he woke and ran for his mother. The lamp at the end of the wall came round at first light, slow and crooked, and Mother let out a breath that set every leaf on the branch trembling.

Now I sit on the tip and count the boats in, and I have never once lost the last lamp.