Black line drawing of a cartoon owl with large eyes perched on a pussy willow branch, a flash design for a tattoo.

Cartoon owl on a willow branch

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a large-eyed cartoon owl perched on a branch with pussy willow buds. The linework is bold and even, with feathers shown as scalloped strokes on the chest and wing. The design is plain black ink on white with no shading or colour, and the owl fills most of the frame.

Owl Bird Branch Bud Feather Cartoon

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 owl over the lock at Hobbs Cut had been sitting on the same willow since March, and every evening he watched me walk the dog past as if I owed him an explanation. I never gave him one. I just told him he looked ridiculous, which he did, with his great round eyes and his fat little buds stuck all over the branch like he'd been dressed by a committee.

Keep reading

Mrs Pargeter from the almshouses decided he was hungry. She was eighty-one and could not be argued with, so on Tuesdays it fell to me to carry a tin of mealworms down the towpath and tip them onto the bank. The owl never came down while I was watching. He waited until I had gone, then dropped to the grass with the dignity of a magistrate, ate every one, and climbed back up without once looking at me.

By June the willow had leafed out and I had stopped pretending I was not fond of him. The lock keeper, Denny Osei, said the owl had been living off the pigeons and had got fussy, and that a fussy owl was a sign of a good summer. I thought that was rubbish until the night the tin was empty and I stood on the bank with nothing to give him. He looked at me for a long time. Then he dropped a single willow bud onto my shoe.

I kept it in an old tobacco tin on the shelf above the till at the bait shop. Mrs Pargeter says it is worth nothing. The owl, when I walk past now, still tells me I look ridiculous, and I still tell him he is the one with a bud stuck on his head.