Colourful owl tattoo with black linework and watercolour-style pink, yellow, green and purple splashes, perched on a branch on the thigh.

Watercolour owl on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large owl sits on a branch, drawn with black sketchy linework and wide yellow-rimmed eyes with dark blue centres. Pink, yellow, green, purple and orange washes sit over the feathers and spill outwards as splatter, giving a loose watercolour effect. The owl is centred on the outer thigh and fills most of the frame.

Thigh Owl Branch Bird Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Ostmark pass for nine days when the owl came down the chimney and sat on the beam above the taproom fire, looking over the travellers like a tax assessor. Hanne Vell kept pouring. She had run the Three Cranes alone since the autumn her husband went through the ice on the lower mere, and she had stopped being surprised by what the weather pushed through her door.

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The guests were three: a dyer called Piet with a sack of clay pots full of pigment, a priest who had given up on his mule, and a girl of perhaps twelve who said nothing at all. Piet had been mixing rose madder, weld yellow and bruised plum for the spring fair, and the owl took an interest in the pots. It dropped to the table, walked through a dish of ochre, and left a line of small gold prints across the board. Hanne laughed, which surprised everyone, herself most of all.

"It is paying for its roost," the priest said, and told the old saying: a snowbound owl leaves a feather of every colour it has seen. Hanne said that was nonsense. Yet every night the owl went out through the shutter gap, over the white mere, and came back with its wings speckled in new colour, pink from the frozen rose bushes, green from the lichen on the tithe barn. The girl began drawing it each morning on the back of the inn ledger, its eyes two gold rings around dark pools.

On the ninth night the wind dropped. The owl flew once round the taproom, shook itself so that colour spattered every wall, and was gone through the chimney before the fire guttered. When the pass opened, Piet found his plum pot empty and the priest's mule refusing the road. Hanne never painted the walls again. She left the splatters where they fell, and the girl's drawing of the owl still hangs above the hearth.