Black and grey owl tattoo with a dotwork mandala chest, shown on the forearm in a black and white photograph.

Owl and mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an owl tattoo on the forearm, with a symmetrical head, round eyes and layered feathered wings. The owl has a dotwork mandala-style flower across its chest, with bold outlines and stippled shading. The background shows a wooden floor and a person in dark clothing, with only the arm showing skin.

Dotwork Traditional Forearm Owl Mandala Flower Feather Eye

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the sawdust. Every fair has an owl, and this one roosted at the top of the big wheel, where the bulbs burn all night and nobody thinks to look up. Her name was Mrs Harrow, though nobody had ever asked her. She kept count of everything the travelling folk left behind on the road: a glove from Carlisle, a wedding ring down a drain in Hull, a child's milk tooth wrapped in a paper napkin.

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Her eyes were round as the brass lamps, and from up there she could see the whole field, the dodgems and the coconut shies and the caravans in their crooked row. What she could not see was her own chest. So a painter called Tobias Vane, who worked the fortune tent one summer, climbed the wheel one night with a pot of ink and a brush made from a cat's tail. He drew a lotus on her breast, a flower of a hundred petals, and every petal was a tiny dot, so she would have something of her own to look at when the lamps went dark.

That autumn the fair stopped in a field outside Lancaster and never packed up. The fog came down thick as wool, and the lanes between the caravans turned to one long grey corridor. Folk walked in circles and called out to each other and heard only their own voices coming back. Mrs Harrow flew the lanes all night, counting heads, and when she came back to the wheel her dotted flower was glowing faintly, every petal catching the lamplight.

They say a child saw it first, a girl with a torch she wasn't meant to have. She followed the glow from the wheel and found the gate, and then the gate found everybody else. So if you're ever lost on a dark field, look up. Find the owl with the flower on her chest, and go the way her petals point.