Black ink flash design of a winged owl beneath an all-seeing eye in a triangle, with a skull, banner and geometric patterns on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl, all-seeing eye and skull tattoo design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design centred on an owl with outspread wings, with an eye inside a triangle above its head. A skull sits below a banner, flanked by flowers, stepped geometric motifs and tapering spikes. The linework is dense and detailed, using solid black fills and fine hatching on a plain cream background.

Blackwork Geometric Owl Eye Triangle Skull Wing Banner Flower Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monitors in the lodge had been dead since March, all but the one on the far left, which showed the stairwell on the eleventh floor in a grey smear. I kept it on anyway. Mr Adeyemi in flat 1104 had asked me to keep an eye out, and I'd taken the phrase literally, the way you do at three in the morning with a flask going cold.

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Something came up the stairwell that night, not a person at first, just the scrape of a trainer on concrete. Then the figure on the screen stopped, looked straight up into the lens, and I saw it was a girl of perhaps fifteen with a carrier bag of shopping and a face like she'd been crying for an hour. Outside, the owl that lived on the parapet shifted its wings. I'd watched it for years, the way it swivelled its head to track the car park lamps, never blinking, never once looking at me.

I went up. The lift smelt of bleach and wet coats, and I rode it with my eyes on the floor numbers, feeling for the first time how little the camera had told me. On the eleventh floor she was sitting on the top step with her knees pulled in. Her mum's shift ran late and her key was in a coat she'd left at school. I didn't ask her anything else. There was a spare key on the hook in the lodge, and I had never once used it on someone who'd come to me.

We walked back down together. At the lodge I switched off the grey screen, the only one that still worked, and the room went dark except for the streetlamp. Through the window the owl dropped off the roof and went low across the car park, wings spread wide, as though it had seen enough for one night and was happy to leave the watching to somebody else.