Black and grey drawing of a geometric owl design with faceted feathers, wide staring eyes and ear tufts, suitable as tattoo flash.

Geometric owl in black and grey

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A tall, narrow drawing of an owl's head and upper body, with its face turned towards the viewer and large round eyes. The plumage is built from sharp, angular facets with fine pencil or ink hatching, and dark shading gives the face and wings depth. The image is entirely black and grey on a white background, with the feathers tapering downwards to the bottom edge.

Geometric Owl Feather Eye Bird

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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 tide gauge on Skerry Nine had been reading wrong for three nights before anyone thought to climb up and look at it. Tamsin Roe went up with a torch clipped to her collar and a tin of silica gel, because the sealed housings fogged in the damp and somebody had to wipe them before the morning returns came in.

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At the top, the old watch owl was waiting. It had been bolted to the gantry since before the seawall was raised, a grey brass thing with a ring of hinged plates for feathers, each one cut to a sharp point and hatched with fine wire scratches where the salt had got in. Its eyes were convex lenses the size of saucers. Nobody had powered it in her lifetime, but when her torch swung across the rail the left lens caught the beam and held it, the way a dog holds a stare before it decides whether to bark.

She wiped the gauge glass, then the lens, then the lens again because her hands were shaking and the cloth kept slipping. Below, the sea pushed at the piles in long, patient knocks. The owl's plates shifted with a sound like someone folding paper, and every feather turned a few degrees towards the water.

In the log she wrote the reading the gauge showed, which was wrong, and beneath it the reading the owl had given her, which was not. Then she closed the book, tucked the tin under her arm, and went down the iron steps without once looking back at the tower's dark bird.