Black and grey pencil drawing of a large-eyed cartoon owl with patterned feathers, perched on a curled branch, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon owl perched on a branch

Black and grey · Flash

A cartoon owl with large round eyes and a rounded body sits on a curled, log-like branch. The owl's wings and belly are filled with swirls, dots and small patterned marks, drawn with soft pencil or fine ink shading. The image is in black and grey on a plain white background, with the design centred and fully visible.

Owl Branch Swirl Cartoon Feather

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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

Right, pull your chair in close, because the ward goes quiet after two and that's when this one gets told. Mind the drip stand, Sunil, it's a temperamental beast.

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Nobody on nights at Harlow Cross remembered who first put the owl on the windowsill ledge. It was carved from a bit of chestnut, round-eyed and daft, with swirls worked into its belly the way a grandmother does with the tip of a hot knife. Every night at ten past three the real owl came down from the sycamore and perched on the branch outside Bay Four, and a boy in the end bed, Tomasz, who had come in with a broken collarbone and stayed three weeks past reason, counted its hoots through the glass.

He never told the nurses what he was waiting for. He only asked, each night, whether the owl had been, and Ruth Ashdown, who had worked nights for thirty-one years and believed in little beyond cannulas and stewed tea, always said yes, because it usually had.

On the last Thursday of March the bird didn't come. Tomasz lay awake watching the empty branch. Ruth sat on the edge of his bed and told him the owl had gone to fetch his mother from the car park, which was nonsense, and he knew it, and he laughed anyway. It was the first time in a fortnight he had.

Ruth went back to her desk and found the chestnut owl on the ledge turned to face the bay, though she was certain she'd left it facing the door. She didn't mention it to Tomasz. Some things can wait for the day shift.