Pencil sketch of a cartoon owl with large round eyes, shaded feathers and a tufted head, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon owl design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a chubby, cartoon-style owl facing forward, with large round eyes ringed by thick rope-like outlines and a tufted brow. The body is shaded with soft grey tones and feathers are suggested with curved pencil lines, with small clawed feet at the base. The owl sits centrally on a pale, slightly vignetted background.

Owl Eye Feather Sketch Bird

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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

The ewe has been down since the lamp went on at four, and you have been kneeling in straw longer than your knees agreed to. Above the pen the owl sits on its beam, round as a loaf, watching you with the flat patience of someone who has already read the ending. Its eyes are too big for its face, ringed in thick rope-like lines, and frost has furred the latch on the door behind you.

Keep reading

Uncle Ray used to say the owl came with the barn, like the damp and the rat that chewed through the good baling twine. You didn't keep an owl, he said, you just agreed not to bother it. So you don't bother it. You turn the lamb by its back legs the way he showed you the winter the snow reached the gatepost, and the ewe groans, and the lamb slides out grey and limp into your hands.

Nothing moves for a long moment. You rub its ribs with a fistful of sacking and count the way you were taught, and get nothing back. Then the owl drops from the beam without a sound, lands on the hay bale at your elbow, and tilts its head toward the lamb as if it were checking a bad invoice.

The lamb sneezes. The owl blinks, slowly, both eyes at once, and lifts off through the gap in the gable into the black field. By dawn there are tracks in the frost all the way to the hedge, and a lamb standing on legs that wobble but hold, bleating at a ewe who has finally stopped pretending she is not interested.