Athena portrait with owl and Greek helmet

Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing in profile of a woman wearing a crested Greek helmet decorated with scrollwork and a Greek key border, with a small owl perched on the brim. The hair is drawn in flowing, wavy strands and the outlines are bold and even, with fine hatching on the helmet crest. The drawing is in black ink on a pale grey background, with no colour.

Helmet Owl Woman Profile Hair Portrait

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the gas lamp, it spits. Right. Down by the old fish market in Thessaloniki, where the cats outnumber the customers after midnight, there was a pawnbroker called Demetrios Kalogeropoulos who kept a helmet under his counter. Not a museum piece. A soldier's helmet, bronze gone green at the seams, with a crest of horsehair so old it crumbled if you breathed on it. Nobody came to redeem it. Nobody could say who had pawned it.

Keep reading

Every night at the hour the trams stopped, an owl sat on the shutter above his door. Grey-brown, unbothered, watching the street the way a magistrate watches a queue. Demetrios swore it was the same bird every time. He swore it spoke once, in a voice like a rusted hinge, and said only, "Not yet."

Then the winter the port flooded, a girl came in out of the rain with a cough and a ledger of debts, and asked to see the helmet. She did not want to buy it. She wanted to know why the owl kept coming back. Demetrios had no answer, so he lifted the helmet onto the counter, and the owl dropped from the shutter, landed on the brim without a sound, and turned its head to look at her the way you look at someone you have been waiting for.

The girl laughed, then stopped laughing. She paid off the ledger that night with the last coins from her mother's purse and walked out with the helmet under her arm. Demetrios never learned where she took it. The owl stayed on the shutter a while longer, then left too, and the street has been quieter since. Mind your step on the way home.