A grid of black and grey ornamental silhouette designs of birds and animals, including a swan, toucan, owl, heron, cat and butterfly, drawn as flash for tattoo use.

Ornamental black and grey animal and bird designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a grid of twelve black silhouette designs of birds and animals, including a swan, toucan, owl, heron, rooster, peacock, cat and butterfly. Each figure is filled with intricate scrollwork, paisley-like curls, feathers and floral motifs in solid black with white cut-out detail. The designs sit on a plain white background in a loose grid, with no skin, body or colour ink visible.

Swan Owl Rooster Peacock Songbird Cat Butterfly Fish Bird Animal Ornamental Scrollwork Feather

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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 paint was still tacky when the heron stepped down off the cabin side and stood in the cut, looking at Maud as if she owed it money. She had mixed the black herself, lamp soot and linseed, the way her grandfather taught her on the Oxford run. She had spent three evenings working scrollwork into the bird's long neck until it could not be told from the reeds.

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Her grandfather had painted every creature on the *Cassandra*: a swan on the tiller board, a rooster on the coal box, an owl above the bunk where she slept. He said a painted bird kept watch for the boat and earned its keep by flying when the water turned foul. The towpath men laughed at him, but none of them had ever lost a load to the weir either.

In March the river came up brown and fast past Iffley. The mooring rope snapped in the dark, and the bow swung hard toward the lock gates. Maud woke to find the owl gone from its wall and a pale square where it had been. She went out in her stockinged feet and saw it on the gate beam, wings folded over the broken rope, holding the bow against the current until she could reach the bollard and make fast.

At dawn the heron was still waiting in the cut. Maud dipped her finest brush, painted one bright eye back into the owl's face, and tied a new rope. The heron lifted its legs out of the water and went up the river toward the swan, which had not yet been painted and so had nothing to pay.