Black outline tattoo of an owl with roses, beaded chains and a face in a medallion on a person's ribs, with a skull tattoo on the forearm at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and roses on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large outline tattoo of an owl with spread wings covers the side of the torso, framed by three roses and a circular medallion containing a face. Thin, even black linework forms the design with little or no shading, and beaded chains loop around the top and left. The image is in black and grey, and the tattoo fills most of the frame with a partial greyscale skull tattoo visible on the forearm at the left edge.

Ribs Forearm Owl Rose Bead Face Medallion Wing Skull

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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

Dear Nell, the owl has come back to the hayloft, the one with the crooked wing, and I've stopped pretending it's a coincidence. Dad says a barn owl eats a field of mice a night and I should leave it be, so I have. Every morning I climb the ladder with the feed bucket and find it on the same beam, eyes like two pennies pressed into wet clay, wings folded so neatly you'd think someone had ironed them.

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Mum's roses by the gate have gone to bare sticks now, but the hips are still hanging on, red as sweets. I cut a few for the kitchen window and found Grandma Edie's beads in the drawer under the tea towels, the string of them knotted where she used to count her worries on the bus. The medallion was in there too, the little silver one with her face worn down to a smudge, the nose and one eye gone soft as soap. I don't know why I did it, but I took the beads and the medallion up the ladder and hung them on the nail beside the beam.

The owl shifted its feathers and looked at them for a long time. Then it dropped off the beam without a sound and rode the cold air out through the gap in the boards, towards the orchard, where the frost was still lying white on the grass. In the morning the chain was in the bucket and the medallion was on the step, face up, and there was one grey feather stuck to the frozen lid of the water trough.

Come for Christmas and bring the good secateurs. If you see the owl, don't tell Dad. He'll want it out of the barn, and I think it's only just settled in.