Black and grey ink drawing of an ornate owl perched on a branch, with dense patterned feathers and large round eyes, designed as a tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate owl on a branch

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an owl perched on a twig, facing forward with large dark eyes framed by patterned rings. The body and wings are filled with intricate feather motifs built from fine lines, stippling and solid black areas. The plain white background has a faint sketch of leaves at the upper left and light foliage at the base.

Blackwork Dotwork Owl Feather Branch Leaves Bird 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

The mill had shut in March, but Hettie Mould kept the pattern room lit every night, pinning cartridge paper to the boards and inking feathers the way her mother had taught her. The owl arrived the week the last loom was carted off to a yard in Oldham. It sat on the sill outside, round-eyed and patient, watching her pen travel back and forth over the same wing.

Keep reading

She had been drawing repeats for the company since she was fourteen, motifs for shawls that would be sold in Mumbai and Buenos Aires. Nobody ever asked what the patterns meant. The owl seemed to ask, tilting its head whenever she sighed over a bad line. "It's only a shawl," she told it. It blinked, unimpressed, and went back to watching her hands.

One morning she came in to find a sheet pinned at the end of the table that she did not remember starting. It was an owl, every feather different from the last, the eye rings built from tiny stars and spirals she had never once drawn. In the bottom corner, in ink that had clearly been walked across the page, were three small prints like the marks a bird leaves in frost. The sill was empty. The window was open a crack.

She pinned the drawing above the stripped looms, where the first light could reach it. When the sun came up grey over the canal, Hettie took a fresh sheet, sharpened her pen, and began the second wing, leaving the eyes until last.