Traditional style colour tattoo of a grey and blue owl with yellow eyes perched beside a pink rose with green leaves, on a limb.

Traditional owl and rose on skin

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold colour tattoo of an owl with yellow eyes, red facial markings and grey, black and red wing feathers, perched on a yellow and brown branch. A pink five-petalled rose with a dark centre and green sepals sits at the lower edge of the design. Thick black outlines, flat colour fills and fine hatched marks on the chest feathers give it a classic American traditional look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorries are already rolling by the time you get the cage door open, so you do it the way your gran taught you, with the lamp off and your back to the wind. Nobody on the fair has ever asked why the owl lives in a painted crate under the dodgems. It was won at the coconut shy in Hull by a man who had never once hit a coconut, and it has been sulking ever since.

Keep reading

You know her by her eyes, which are the colour of the brass lamps on the Gallopers and never quite close, even in daylight. Vera painted the rose on the crate lid years back, five petals, pink as boiled sweets, with a green cup where the stem should be. She said it would keep the bird calm. It didn't. Since the spring it has sat stiff on its perch, turning its head to watch the generator as though waiting to be asked a question.

The field behind the church car park is soft from a week of rain. You carry the crate across it with the ground tugging at your boots, past stalls already stripped to bare pegs, and set it down under a hawthorn. The owl shuffles its grey feathers, edged in red like a gentleman's cuffs, and does not move. You lift the latch and step back. For a long minute nothing happens. Then the bird drops onto the branch above, talons closing on the bark like fingers counting coins.

When you turn to go, a single petal has stuck to your sleeve, pink and papery, rubbed off the lid you forgot to wipe. You leave it there. Behind you the owl makes its low, unhurried call, and you find yourself walking faster, the way you did as a boy, not wanting to be seen leaving something you loved.

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