Colour tattoo of an owl made of flowers and leaves inside a black geometric mandala border, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower owl in a mandala border on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The design shows an owl with large round eyes formed from orange and yellow petals, its body filled with blue, pink, purple and green flowers and leaves. A black geometric mandala with star-shaped points and dotted detail frames the owl, with a butterfly and more flowers visible within the body. Bold black outlines and dense colour fill the design, which sits on the outer thigh of a person wearing denim shorts against a red fabric background.

Geometric Botanical Thigh Owl Flower Mandala Leaves Butterfly Petal

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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

By the third sleep-cycle the lamps in the eastern dome have started to dim, and the crew is arguing about whether to wake the botanists. You don't argue. You take the ladder up to the great mosaic the first gardeners laid across the hull ceiling, a ring of black star-points framing an owl made entirely of flowers. Its two eyes are the sunward lamps, orange petals ringed around the bulbs that have kept the seedlings alive since before your grandmother's grandmother was born.

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The sockets have gone cloudy with salt. You know this because your mother showed you years ago how to lift the petal-glass with a damp cloth and a thumb, and how the bulbs hum when they are happy. Nobody else is tall enough to reach without the scaffold, and the scaffold is rusted through at the third rung, so you go up the rope instead, hands raw, spares knocking against your hip, counting the dotted points of the mandala as you pass them the way children count stairs.

When the left eye finally catches, a warm stripe spreads across the bed of purple and blue below, and a pale moth that has lived in the blooms all along lifts off the petals and circles your head. Down on the deck someone cheers without knowing what they are cheering for. You hang there a while, the owl's dark body close against your cheek, and listen to the water in the pipes running green again.