Watercolour-style owl on the side

You will think I have gone soft, but I have taken the sign-painting job at the Hollin Arms and I have been up the ladder every morning since Tuesday. Mr Pell wanted a stag, the usual, and I told him the stag had been done to death in every village between here and Ludlow. So I am painting an owl instead. A barn owl, the pale sort that comes out of the Ashcombe woods at dusk and hangs over the long meadow like a dropped handkerchief.

The trouble is the colour. Pell's wife keeps the paints in a biscuit tin and most of them have dried to crumbs, so I have been mixing what I can from the dye-seller at market. The face came out well, a round white disc with a dark eye, the way the owl looks when it turns its head and catches you watching. But the wings would not sit still. I laid a wash of violet across the crown and it ran into the pink I had put down for the breast, and for a whole afternoon the bird looked like a bruise. Pell said it looked like a fine evening. I said it looked like a sunset that had given up.

Then on Thursday the owl came down to the gatepost below the ladder and sat there watching me work. I swear it had the same tilt to its head that I had painted. I stayed up until the light went, dabbing violet and orange together on the board, and when I climbed down my fingers were stained to the knuckle and I had a sign I was not ashamed of.

Mr Pell hung it at dawn. The owl faces left, toward the village, as if it has decided to stay.

Love, Nell