Black lettering tattoos, including KEEP GRL PWR, on a forearm beside a red floral tattoo on an upper arm, with a mandala owl printed on a white T-shirt.

Lettering tattoos with an owl print tee

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A person in a white T-shirt with a large black and white mandala-style owl print across the chest, so the owl is a printed design rather than a tattoo. On the forearm, black fine-line lettering reads KEEP GRL PWR above an arrow, with a second script word below, and a partly visible black tattoo sits higher on the other arm. The upper arm on the right shows a red and grey floral tattoo and some darker linework, giving the image mixed colour.

Lettering Forearm Upper arm Owl Mandala Arrow Lettering Script Flower T-shirt

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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

Mind the lamp, love, it's the last of the paraffin. Now sit where Mrs Pell used to sit, and I'll tell you about the owl that lived in the church tower of Sallow Cross, the one that watched the whole valley for forty winters and never once blinked when the bell rang.

Keep reading

Her name was Idris Vane, though everyone called her Dris, and she was the clockmaker's girl. Her father mended the church clock with a pair of tweezers and a bad temper, and while he cursed the gears she sat on the stone sill and drew owls on the backs of ration cards. She drew them the way other girls knitted, round and round, every feather a small circle inside a larger one, every ring a little door to the next. The vicar said it was idle work. The owl in the tower said nothing, because owls don't.

Then came the winter the clock stopped at a quarter past three and wouldn't start. Dris climbed up with a paper pattern rolled in her teeth and found the owl sitting on the great wheel, its eyes like two dinner plates ringed in patterned feathers. It had laid its claws across the brass teeth as if holding the time still on purpose. She sat down beside it and drew it, line by careful line, until the drawing and the bird looked the same. Then she pressed a pencil arrow into the margin pointing at the works and wrote one word beneath it: KEEP.

The clock started at dawn. Nobody ever knew whether the owl or the drawing had done it, and that, love, is the whole of the story.