Two black tribal-style owl designs on a white background, one perched with wings folded and one with wings spread, both in a Polynesian-inspired blackwork style.

Tribal owls, perched and spread-winged

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two owl designs drawn in solid black on a white background, one upright with folded wings and one with wings fully spread. The linework is bold, with curled spiral motifs forming the eyes, chest and wing edges, and the wing feathers are rendered as tapering stripes. The image is monochrome with no shading, and the composition places the two designs one above the other.

Blackwork Traditional Owl Tribal Spiral Wing Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the oven is still ticking and the flour hasn't settled, so you'll have to listen over the sound of the mixer. Mrs Okafor's bakery on Thorncliffe Row kept its lamp lit all night for one reason, and that reason was the owl painted on the shutter above the door. Nobody remembers who drew it. Some say the baker's boy, some say a sign-writer who owed her money. What everybody agreed on was that the owl had two spirals for eyes, and that its wings spread across the whole shutter whenever the bread went in.

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Old Tobias, who ground the flour at the mill, swore the owl turned its head. He said it turned to watch the lane at three in the morning, when the carts came down from the valley with their lamps turned low. One February the carts came late and the lane stayed black, and Mrs Okafor's son Emeka took a lantern out to look for the driver. He found the cart stopped at the bend, the mule standing patient and the man asleep with the reins still wound around his fists.

Emeka brought them both back at first light, along with two sacks of rye that should have been soaked through by the rain. When he looked up at the shutter, the owl's wings had folded tight against its sides, the way a bird folds them when the watch is finished. Mrs Okafor set the kettle on and never asked the owl for anything again. She didn't need to. The bread was always ready by three, and on the frostiest mornings the spirals looked a little tighter, as though it was listening.