Black ornamental design of two sleeping owls on a curled branch with leaves and a German phrase, drawn as a stencil style line design with no body placement shown.

Two owls on a branch stencil design

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two owls with closed eyes perched together on a curling branch, the larger owl decorated with swirling patterns across its body and the smaller owl with floral detailing on its chest. Leaves and scrolled foliage frame the figures, and the German text In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft is set in bold capitals beneath the branch. It is a solid black on white graphic with no shading or colour.

Owl Branch Leaves Swirl Scrollwork Floral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By eleven the rain had turned the cobbles of Castle Square to a skin of brown water, and the awnings sagged under it like wet sails. I was losing money on a fish stall I'd borrowed from my cousin, so I stopped trying to sell and sat behind the trays, watching the pigeons give up on the bread. Two stalls along, Mr Pryce had shut his eyes and folded his hands over his belly, as though the weather were a sermon he had heard before.

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"You'll get more out of the sky if you stop frowning at it," he said without opening them. I told him the sky owed me forty pounds. He laughed, a dry sound like a drawer shutting, and said his late wife had once made him sit in a supermarket car park for an hour because a barn owl was roosting in the lamp post above them. "Didn't move, didn't blink, got on with its night," he said. "Only thing in that car park with any sense."

I didn't believe him until the rain eased at half past twelve and the square went quiet. Then I saw them: two owls on the iron railing of the old corn exchange, one large and one small pressed against its side, both with their eyes closed. The big one's feathers had the look of carved wood in the wet light, and the small one wore a little crown of something pale, like blossom. They didn't flinch when a delivery van reversed past them, beeping.

I sold the rest of the herring to a man in a yellow cape for half price. When I looked up again Mr Pryce was gone and the railing was empty. I did not sell another fish that day. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, the way he had, and let the water run off the awning in one long silver line until the lorries came to take us home.