Black and grey cartoon owl tattoo with green irises on the inner forearm, drawn in Traditional style with bold outlines.

Cartoon owl with green eyes on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon owl with large round eyes, each with a green iris and black pupil, sits on a soft-bodied perch shape with feathered wings and talons at the base. The design uses bold black outlines with grey shading on the body, wings and feathers, while the eyes carry the only colour. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain skin background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Owl Eye Cartoon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wind, for it comes over the Gallow Pass with teeth in it. Now. You want the owl with the green eyes, the one who never shut them? Then hush, because I tell it only once a winter and the snow is listening.

Keep reading

There was an owl called Hettie Marrow who lived in a hollow oak above the pass, and she had eyes so wide and round that the shepherds swore she had been born startled. Green they were, the colour of bruised apple, and she was vain of them past all reason. Every dusk she would perch on the cold stone of the cairn and say, 'Look at me, I have seen everything,' and every dusk the wind would answer with the same nothing it always did. Her talons gripped the lichen and her feathers puffed, grey as wet slate, and she waited for someone to be impressed.

One January a boy came up the pass with a lantern and a goat that would not walk, and he sat down beside the cairn to swear at it. Hettie blinked at him, slowly, which she had never done in her life, and said, 'You cannot see a thing in this dark.' The boy laughed and said he could see the goat was a fool, and the goat agreed with him by lying down in the snow.

So Hettie, who was proud, closed one great green eye to prove him wrong, then the other, and found that the whole pass lay quiet behind her lids, every stone and drift of it. When she opened them again the goat had got up and was walking on ahead of them all the way down, as if it had only been waiting for someone to notice.