Colour tattoo of a blue and orange owl perched on a red berry branch with leaves, across the top of a foot, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and berry branch on a foot

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A large owl with wide amber eyes and a blue-grey head sits on a branch with red berries and olive-green leaves. The feathers are shaded in blue, grey and peach with bold dark outlines and scale-like feather patterns on the chest. Warm red and yellow splashes sit behind the owl, and the design wraps across the top of the foot.

Neo-trad Other Owl Branch Berry Leaves Feather

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

Mind the gate, it sticks in the wet, and sit where the light falls, because I'm not telling this one twice. You know the owl on the sundial wall? The blue one with the copper eyes that never blinks when you wave at it? That's Mabry. Before your grandfather was a boy, Mabry was nothing but a painted tin thing Mr Oakes nailed to the fence to frighten sparrows off the cherries.

Keep reading

Then came the summer the bramble took the whole south border. Nobody could get through it, not the postman, not the cat. Ada Sowerby, who kept the back garden the way other women keep secrets, went out with her shears and a flask of tea and came back at dusk with red berries stuck to her cardigan like sealing wax. 'It's listening to me,' she said. 'The bramble, I mean.' Nobody believed her, though the berries were the reddest any of us had ever seen.

She sat up with the owl that night. I'm sure of it, because the kitchen lamp was still burning at four. By morning the south border lay open as a path, the thorns bent back like a gate held for a guest, and the owl had dropped one red berry onto the step, bright as a coal. Ada ate it and said it tasted of rain and of being forgiven for something. She never told us what.

So when you go pulling at the hedge, remember you are only ever a visitor in someone else's garden. Now fetch the biscuits, and mind the gate.