Colour tattoo of a sketchy owl with red poppies and a blue crescent moon on the outer thigh, in a watercolour style.

Watercolour owl and poppies on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A loose sketch of an owl perched among red poppies, with a blue crescent moon above it. Thin black linework outlines the owl and stems, while soft washes of pink, blue, purple and orange fill the feathers, eyes and petals. The design sits centrally on the outer thigh and is photographed straight on against a dark background.

Fine line Thigh Owl Moon Crescent moon Poppy Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The owl arrived the week the poppies broke through the cliff path, which my predecessor, Mr Haskett, always said meant bad weather. He was wrong about that, as he was about most things, but he was right that the bird would be a nuisance. It settled on the iron rail outside the lamp room and took the moths that flung themselves at the glass, and by the second week I had stopped shooing it away and started leaving the shutter open a crack so it could watch the sea with me.

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It liked the moon best. When the new crescent hung above Gull Stack, the owl would turn its head slowly, as though checking the moon had not moved while it wasn't looking. I wrote that in the log, under the weather and the oil count, because nobody at the depot would read it anyway.

In October the clockwork seized halfway through a gale, and the great lens began to slow. I had to wind the mechanism by hand every twenty minutes until dawn, my arms shaking, the glass streaming. Somewhere past three the owl dropped onto the sill beside me and stayed there, eyes fixed on the beam as it swung out over the water. When a small fishing boat appeared in the trough below, its lamp answering mine, the owl lifted off and circled once above the light before setting its feet back on the rail.

In the morning the boat was tied up at the harbour, and the poppies along the path had shed their petals onto the steps. I found one grey feather on the open page of the log, lying across the place where I had written the name of the boat. I left it there. Haskett would have thrown it out, but Haskett never kept a log he expected anyone to read.