Symmetrical ornate owl design with dotwork, floral and paisley patterns, drawn in a single dark brown ink on a white background.

Ornate owl in sugar skull style

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical owl drawn front-on, with large decorative eyes filled with flower-like motifs, a heart-shaped beak and a patterned chest of rows and dots. Fine dots, leaves, scrolls and small roses fill the body, wings and talons. The design is rendered in a single dark brown tone on white, with no shading or colour.

Dotwork Botanical Owl Rose Heart Floral pattern Sugar skull Paisley Leaves

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

The barge Marguerite had been tied up below the mill weir for three winters before anyone thought to ask what the owl on her bow was for. Old Tobias Wren said it was for keeping the rats off, and that was the first lie he told the boy who came to help with the locks that spring. The boy, Arthur Penhallow, was fourteen and too quick to take an answer that did not fit.

Keep reading

The owl was painted on a board nailed under the tiller, and it had eyes like two wheels of flowers, roses in the corners of its chest, and a heart where a beak should be. Arthur scraped at the paint one wet afternoon and found a second owl underneath, plainer, with no roses at all. Tobias saw the scraping and sat down on the cabin step without a word.

He told it that night over a pan of eels. His wife had painted the first owl the year they married, when the canal was still busy with coal and nobody thought the water would ever go quiet. When she died he had painted the roses over the bare one, so the barge would look like a home to somebody passing. Then he showed Arthur the lock keeper's ledger, where every boat that had gone through since was written in his own hand, and there were no names beside the last nine winters.

Arthur said nothing for a long time. In the morning he took the tin of brown ink from the cabin shelf, pulled up a stool at the bow, and began filling in the small dots along the owl's breast, one at a time, until the old man woke to the sound of it and came out in his coat.