Neo-traditional barn owl tattoo with spread wings and a pale blue mandala behind it, on the calf.

Barn owl on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A barn owl with spread grey wings and a reddish-brown breast is shown turning its head, with its talons drawn in fine detail. Bold black outlines and smooth shading define the feathers, and a pale blue mandala-style ring sits behind the bird. Greys and browns of the owl contrast with the blue background and small red accents.

Neo-trad Calf Owl Barn owl Mandala Feather Wing Talon

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

The dance hall at Coldharbour was a threshing barn until the Pyecroft brothers laid a sprung floor over the threshing boards and hung paraffin lamps from the beams. On dance nights a barn owl sat in the rafters above the fiddlers and watched the floor turn, and nobody in the parish thought it strange, because the owl had always been there, and the barn had always been its.

Keep reading

Nell Harrow could not dance. Her left leg had been broken under a hay wain when she was nine and had set short and stiff, so she sat on the bench under the owl every Saturday and tapped time with her good foot. The owl would turn its head right round to look at her, the way a clock turns its hands, and she came to believe it kept better time than the fiddlers did.

One autumn night the fiddler Tobias Crane stopped in the middle of a jig and said he had a tune his grandmother had taught him, one with no steps to it, only a lean. He played it low. Nell saw the pale blue ring of lamplight on the whitewash and felt something lift in her hip. She went out onto the floor on her stick, and the stick dropped, and she went round anyway, slow and crooked, while the owl came off the beam without a sound and wheeled over her head in a long grey circle. Every step she took, the bird took too, and her short leg stopped mattering because the floor was carrying her.

When the tune ended the lamps had burned down. Nell walked home without her stick. In the morning the barn door stood open, and on the boards where the dancing had been lay one grey feather, and beside it a single talon print in the dust, bent and small, as if something had set its weight down gently and decided to stay.