Black ink drawing of a front-facing owl with a geometric patterned face, feathers and talons, styled as a tattoo design with no body part shown.

Geometric owl design in black ink

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing owl with wide eyes, pointed ear tufts and talons, drawn in black linework on a white background. The face, chest and wings are filled with triangles, dots, scales and a central mandala-like flower. Solid black areas, fine hatching and repeated patterns create contrast and symmetry across the whole composition.

Geometric Dotwork Owl Eye Feather Mandala Triangle Dot Flower Talon Pattern

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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 rain had found the gap under the tarpaulin again, so I was wrapping the drawing books in oilcloth when Mr Abernethy came shuffling between the fishmongers and the crate of wilting lilies. He didn't want the sketchbooks. He wanted the owl, the one tucked at the back of the box that nobody else ever asked for.

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I knew the page before I found it. Black ink on cheap cartridge, the lines packed so close they seemed to hum when you held them to the light. The owl looked straight out at us with eyes like two wet coins, its ear tufts sharp as a pair of shears. Every feather was a small scale, every scale a triangle, and the chest bloomed into a flower with a single dot at its heart.

'Maureen drew it the winter the trains stopped,' he said, and he counted the dots on the left wing with a finger that shook. 'Two hundred and twelve. She said each one was a night I'd be late home and she'd not have to wonder where I'd got to.' He pressed a pound coin onto the table, then another, then took a sheet of my oilcloth and wrapped the owl with more care than I'd ever wrapped anything.

The rain drummed harder. Past the cheese stall a van reversed, beeping. I looked at the owl's eyes, which Maureen had shaded so the pupils seemed to follow you, and for the first time in six years of selling other people's old paper, I wanted to keep something back. I slid the last drawing from the box and held it up under the bulb. It was another owl, facing the other way, and both of them were watching the door.