Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a wide-eyed owl perched on a branch, on the forearm.

Wide-eyed owl on a branch on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon owl with large round eyes and feather tufts sits on a horizontal branch, with a pointed tail hanging below. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft grey shading across the body and wings. Pinkish redness around the eyes and chest suggests the skin is still healing, and the ink itself is black and grey.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, the owl of Vell Hollow had eyes like two cartwheels, and it never once shut them, not even on the Feast of Lanterns. Every night it sat on the same crooked ash branch above the millpond, peering down at the miller's sons as though they were the most astonishing thing it had ever seen, and every night the miller's sons went home and dreamt about being looked at.

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The king of Ambermoor had not slept a full night since his coronation. He blamed the owl, and so he sent six soldiers up the ash with a sack and a very long rope. The branch creaked. The owl turned its head slowly, all the way round, and looked at them. Five of the soldiers came down with their helmets on backwards and a story about being watched by something very old. The sixth stayed up there a long while, muttering about tax, and was found at dawn asleep on the branch, which the king took as proof of the owl's guilt.

It was Bettany Crumb, the palace gardener, who finally climbed up with a pie wrapped in a cloth. She sat beside the owl and asked it, quite reasonably, why it stared. The owl said nothing, as owls do. So Bettany told it about the king, who was frightened of the dark and kept one window lit in the tower every night so he could see that the world was still there. The owl considered this for a long time. Then it blinked, once, the first blink anyone in Vell Hollow had seen in a hundred years.

That night the tower window went dark for the first time since the coronation, and the king slept until noon. The owl stayed on its branch, wide-eyed and patient, watching the place where the light used to be.

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