Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric owl with spread wings

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical owl faces forward with its wings fully spread upward and outward. The wings and body are built from angular panels filled with fine hatching, dotwork, chevrons and small diamond motifs. The palette is mostly beige, brown and grey with blue, red and yellow accents, all set against a plain white background.

Geometric Owl Wing Feather Face 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 hall at Hollin Park still smells of the same floor polish it did in 1998, and I have counted the exits twice before Dean Pryce arrives with his tie knotted like a fist. Nobody asks what I do. I teach geometry now, at a sixth form in Stockport, which means my evenings go on drawing symmetry in the margins of marking.

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Mr Aldous, our old art teacher, finds me by the squash table. He has kept a folder of my Year Ten work, and he pulls out a sheet of graph paper where I tried to make an owl from nothing but triangles, every feather a chevron, the wings splayed so both halves match to the millimetre. He tells me I never finished it. He says I kept measuring instead of drawing.

He was right, and I admitted as much. I had been afraid that one wrong angle would tip the whole bird out of true, so I never let the pencil touch the eyes. The owl stared up from the folder with its pupils left blank, waiting for someone to decide what it was looking at.

I took the sheet home in my coat pocket, creased already. That night I sat at the kitchen table, ruled a line straight down the middle, and worked outwards one panel at a time until the wings reached the edge of the page. The eyes I coloured last, in gold, because by then I knew exactly which way the bird was facing.