Black ornamental feather tattoo in blackwork and dotwork style on the upper arm, with owl-like eye motifs and scrollwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental feather with owl-like eyes on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large feather runs down the upper arm, its central shaft in solid black. Each side is filled with dense dotwork, scrollwork and lacy hatched patterns, and the lower half contains two round eye-like motifs. The tattoo is in black ink only, shown against pale skin with a dark top and a black cap at the edges of the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Feather Owl Eye Scrollwork Swirl Dot 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 owl came down on the bonnet just past the cattle grid at Sallow Wells, and for a long second we considered each other through the windscreen, two round faces lit by my headlamps. Then it lifted with a sound like a sheet shaken out, and a single feather came loose and spun down onto the wiper. I stopped in the middle of the dry lake road and climbed out to fetch it.

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It was longer than my forearm, black along the spine and lace-edged where the light caught the dots, with two round marks low on the vane like a pair of spectacles someone had forgotten to take off. My aunt Ines would have known what to do with it. She had pressed owl feathers between the pages of the road atlas for forty years, one for every county she had driven through alone, and the atlas still lived on the passenger seat of the car I had inherited along with her debts and her stubbornness.

I was meant to be taking that atlas to the coast, to her sister's house above the harbour, but I had missed the turn at the sign for Sallow Wells and kept going anyway. The road ran straight through nothing for forty miles. Somewhere past midnight I noticed I had been talking to the feather, which seemed a sign of something, though I could not have said what. I laid it open on the last page of the atlas, beside a map of a country I had never reached, and closed the cover gently.

At the next junction the sign pointed back the way I had come, towards the sea. I took the turn, and the feather's two round eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead of us all the way to the water.