Black and white line drawing of a symmetrical owl with large eyes and decorative patterned feathers, drawn as a tattoo design.

Ornate owl design, front view

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing owl drawn in bold black outlines with large round eyes, a small beak and a symmetrical body. The feathers and wings are filled with dotwork, mandala-like motifs, diamonds and hatched patterns. The design is black on white with no shading or colour, and it is centred on the page with the tail fanning out at the bottom.

Dotwork Geometric Owl Feather Mandala 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 old well at the bottom of Harrow Lane had gone dry the summer Mags Tully's husband went to sea, and nobody in the village thought to blame the owl for it. The owl had been roosting in the yew at the garden's edge for as long as the cottage had stood, a broad grey shape with eyes like two hand-mirrors, and folk said it kept the mice down and the gossip quiet, which was more than the vicar could say for himself.

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Mags did not believe in such things, but she left a saucer of milk on the wall each evening anyway, because her mother had. One night in October she found the saucer licked clean and a feather laid on the stone beside it, long and barred and dotted like a page of lace. She tucked it in her apron pocket and forgot it until the spring, when the well began to murmur again and her husband's letter came up the lane on the carrier's cart, dry as bone and smelling of salt.

She went out to the yew to thank the bird, and found it already awake, turning its flat face toward her in the dusk. It said nothing. It only lifted one wing, slow as a fan, and showed her the pattern beneath, rings within rings, diamonds within the rings, and she understood that the garden had been keeping its own accounts all along.

She stood with the milk jug in her hands until the stars came out. Then she went in, filled the saucer again, and wrote a reply to her husband that said only that the water had come back and the owl was well.