Black and grey neo-traditional owl tattoo with floral detailing on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate owl with flowers on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing owl with wide eyes and a patterned face sits at the centre of the image, its body filled with scalloped feather detail. Roses or similar blooms frame its shoulders and a larger flower sits at the base of its body. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey with bold outlines and soft shading, and it sits on the side of the torso against a plain, softly lit background.

Neo-trad Ribs Owl Flower Rose Feather

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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

Shut the gate behind you, lad, and mind the third step, it has been loose since my father's time. Right. The pass at Harrow Cleft is no place for a man talking to himself, so I'll talk to the owl instead, and you can listen in.

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Every winter the snow came down off Sallow Fell and filled the road to the height of a horse's ear. Mistress Agnes Pell kept the waystation then, a stone box with one lamp in the window. She had a wooden owl nailed above the door, painted by a tinker who owed her for bread. Its eyes were wide and its breast was all petals, roses carved where the feathers should have been, and travellers swore it turned its head when the wind dropped.

One January a carter came up the cleft with a sick boy under the sacking, and the lamp blew out in a gust. Agnes stood on the step with her shawl over her mouth and called into the white. Nothing came back but the wind. Then, from above, a soft hoot, and the carter swore the owl had flown off its nail to perch on the gatepost, pale-eyed and waiting. She followed where it looked. The road was there, a hand's width of it, and the boy got through.

The tinker came back in spring to ask after his bread. Agnes gave him a sack of flour and told him the owl had done the work. He laughed and said it was only paint. She didn't argue. She pointed up at the nail, empty and bright with frost, and the carter's boy, grown now, still walks the cleft some nights, listening for a hoot that is never far off.