Black tribal-style tattoo with symmetrical owl-like and skull-like motifs on the upper arm of a person in a black sleeveless top.

Black tribal upper arm tattoo

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical black tribal design covers the outer upper arm, built from bold solid shapes with flame-like curls and small owl-like and skull-like motifs. The linework is heavy and filled, with little shading, and the design runs vertically from the shoulder area down the arm. The photograph is taken indoors against a wall of framed flash sheets, with the person's face outside the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Tribal Owl Skull Ornament Flourish

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 third night the snow stopped, Tobias Greave found an owl perched on the yoke of the ox harness, its face turned toward the byre door as if it had been waiting for him. He did not drive it off. His grandfather had nailed a sheep's skull above that door, horns bleached grey, and the old man had always said the owls kept the dead at the edge of the farm so the living could sleep. Tobias had never believed it. The hay was half gone, the well was a white lid of ice, and he had begun to think belief was a thing a man could not afford in January.

Keep reading

Before dawn the owl called from the hawthorn at the bottom field, a hollow sound like someone blowing across a bottle. He went down with the lantern, his breath freezing on his collar, and followed it through the drifts to the gap by the wall. There lay Mab, the spotted ewe, half buried, and beside her two lambs too weak to stand. The owl dropped from the branch and settled on the gatepost, turning its head in slow circles, the way a man might nod toward a path.

He carried the first lamb inside under his coat and came back for the second, and by the time the grey light reached the valley both were steaming by the kitchen range. His wife Ruth looked at the frost in his beard and then at the skull above the door, and said nothing, which was how she said most things worth hearing.

In March the thaw came and the owl was gone from the yoke. Tobias took down the old skull, scrubbed it clean, and nailed up a new one with flames and feathers painted on the brow, so that whatever watched from the barn would know which gate was his.