Black and grey blackwork owl with ornate filigree patterns and a faint forest backdrop, tattooed across a person's upper arm.

Ornamental owl on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl faces the viewer, with a filigree pattern across its brow, heavy black fill and detailed white linework on the eyes, feathers and chest. Soft grey shading behind the owl suggests trees and a misty landscape. The design fills the upper arm, and the photo is taken at an angle with a plain background.

Blackwork Upper arm Owl Tree Forest Filigree Ornament Feather Eye

Find an artist for this

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

Nell Fairweather had been warned never to look an owl in the eye on the fairground, because the one at Sawyer's Travelling Show had been there longer than the ghost train and remembered everyone who stared. She stared anyway, on the third night of October, when the generator coughed and the lights of the big wheel dropped one by one into the mud.

Keep reading

The owl was not a real bird. Old Sawyer had carved it from a single block of lime wood the winter his wife died, working the filigree across its brow with a bradawl and a steady hand, then painting the eyes so they caught the lamplight. Each evening he carried it out of the booth and set it on the coconut shy, and each morning the painted pupils seemed to have shifted. Nell had decided this was the lamp. In her first season she had decided a great many things about the show.

When Sawyer's heart gave out in his caravan that night, the showfolk gathered at his door and argued over who would take the stall. Nell went instead to the shy alone and lifted the owl down. Where the wood had been hollowed underneath, she found a folded paper: a list of every village the show had visited, and beside each name a small mark, a feather or a tree. Her own name sat at the bottom, and the ink was still wet.

She understood then that the owl had been keeping the route, not the takings. Beyond the lamps the dark fields ran off towards the pines, and mist was already lifting off the river. Nell tucked the owl under her arm, shut the booth, and went to find the road out before the morning crowds arrived.