Watercolour-style owl tattoo in purple, orange and blue with yellow eyes and a keyhole on the inner forearm.

Watercolour owl with keyhole on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large owl faces forward with bright yellow eyes, set within loose splashes of purple, orange, teal and blue. A dark keyhole sits on the owl's chest, and a small circular symbol with a triangle appears near the lower left edge of the design. The soft, bleeding edges and splattered ink give a painterly watercolour look across the forearm.

Forearm Owl Keyhole Eye Symbol Splashes Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the windfalls had gone soft in the long grass, and the owl had settled into the old Bramley above the stone wall. Nobody on Hollow Lane could say where it had come from. Mrs Pryce swore it had followed her from Ledbury. To me it looked like something painted onto the dusk that had never quite dried.

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The key had gone missing with the cider press. Dad said it was in the shed, Uncle Tom said it was in the brook, and the only other person near the shed that week was our Nell, who was nine and had a habit of posting things down the well. So after tea I went up the orchard with a torch and a fistful of crab apples, because Gran said owls liked a fair trade.

It ignored the apples. It turned its head slowly, all the way round, the way owls do in films, and then it fixed its yellow eyes on me until the torch felt foolish in my hand. Its breast was all violet and rust, and there, in the middle of the splashes, sat a small dark keyhole I was certain had not been there a minute before. The owl shuffled sideways along the branch, and something brass slid from its feet and dropped into the grass.

I took the key to the shed the next morning. It turned as smoothly as butter. Inside there was only the press, dusty and quiet, and on its lid a single crab apple, bright as a coin, that I had not put there and could not account for. I left it where it was and went back up the orchard to say thank you.