Neo-trad style owl with red watercolour splashes and a typewriter-style quote above it, tattooed on the upper arm and shoulder.

Owl and quote on upper arm and shoulder

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large owl with a detailed feathered body, outlined in black with blue eyes, sits on the upper arm, with a typewritten quote in black across the shoulder above it. Heavy black shading and fine dotted detail fill the owl, while loose red watercolour-style splashes run behind it and around the shoulder. The collage shows four close and wide views of the same healed or recent tattoo against a dark top.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Owl Quote Text Watercolour splash Feather 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

Every night after the last bus left Melbury Cross, Edith Pell kept the post office lamp lit and typed letters for people who could not manage their own. Farm hands, widows, the Hallam twins who fought over commas. At ten o'clock the owl came to the same sill above the back counter and sat with its blue eyes on the keys while she worked, and the town said it was her husband come back to keep an eye on the accounts, though Edith had buried him in 1938 and didn't believe a word of it.

Keep reading

In March a lad called Dennis Rowe came in with a sheet of paper folded smaller than a stamp. His father had gone down the pit at Ashby and not come up, and the Coal Board was sitting on the wages owed. Dennis wanted a letter that said so plainly, without the hat-in-hand words the clerks liked. Edith typed it three times because her fingers kept stopping on the keys. The owl shifted, dropped a grey feather onto the carriage, and sat very still until she finished, as if it had views on the wording.

The Board's cheque came in May. Dennis brought it round with a paper bag of boiled sweets and said he'd carried the letter in his coat every day so it would not get lost. Edith asked if he'd managed to sleep. He said he had, and that his mother had stopped setting out a third plate.

That night the sill was empty. Edith typed a few lines for the Hallams, wrong commas and all, and when the bus lamps swept the square she looked up through the glass and saw the owl on the chapel roof, wings open, watching the road out as if it meant to follow whoever took it.