Realistic drawing of a barn owl in flight with spread wings and green eyes, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Barn owl in flight, coloured pencil design

Realism · Colour · Flash

A barn owl with pale face, green eyes and outstretched wings swoops towards the viewer, with loose feathers drifting around it. The drawing uses soft shading and fine feather detail in pencil, with dark grey outlines at the wing edges. The palette is mainly warm tans, browns and yellows, with greys and touches of green, set on a pale cream background.

Realism Owl Barn owl Bird Feather Wing

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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 down, love, and take your boots off before you sit on my good rug, because you'll want to hear this properly and not with one ear on the door. The gale that March came up the coast from Cromer, and it drove the marsh owls inland the way the tide drives driftwood. I had the boarding house then, Gull Cottage on Harbour Row, four rooms and a breakfast room that smelled of kippers whatever you did to it.

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The owl came in through the scullery window the night the lamp blew out. I heard it before I saw it, a soft ripping sound, like someone tearing good paper slowly. When I lit the candle it was sitting on the top of the stair post, its heart-shaped face turned to me, pale as the milk on the sill, and those two green eyes looking at me as if I owed it rent. It didn't flinch. It only tipped its head, and a feather let go and came spinning down past my nose.

Mr Abbott in room three swore it was an omen. My sister said it was a bird with more sense than the lot of us, out of the weather. I'll tell you what I believe: it stayed three days, and every morning the hall had feathers on it, tawny and soft, drifting across the lino as though someone had shaken out a pillow.

On the third morning it was gone, and so was Mr Abbott's rent book, and so was the feather from the stair post. I never found out which of them took the other. But when the spring tide came in I swept the hall, and there in the corner under the coat hooks lay one feather left, pale gold, with a grey edge sharp as a pencil line. I kept it. You can have a look at it on the mantel after your tea.