Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm, showing a barn owl face on one half and a skull on the other, divided by a vertical line.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and skull split design on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a barn owl's face on the left and a skull on the right, split down the middle by a vertical line that extends beyond the circular frame. The owl's eye and facial disc are built from fine stippled dots, while the skull side uses denser shading and sharper contrast. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, centred in the frame against a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Owl Barn owl Skull Eye Bird

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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

Mind the step, it's slick where the tide reaches. Sit you down on that creel and I'll tell it the way my father told it to me, out on the Hollow Mouth with the lamps hung low. There was a net-mender in Cullery called Ada Brisk, who could tell a sound from a sea-bird by its wingbeat in the dark. She'd sit on the quay with her needle going and listen to the boats come in, counting them back to harbour like beads.

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One November the old lighthouse keeper went missing off the Skerry, and the coastguard found nothing but his boots on the rocks, laced up tight. That night a barn owl came down onto the wall above Ada's door, pale as a dinner plate, and it would not fly off. She threw her shawl at it and it only turned its head, slow, and looked at her with one black eye. The other side of its face was no face at all. Bone showed through where the feathers should have been, a split as clean as if someone had taken a knife to a moon.

She followed it down to the water the next night, and it led her out along the breakwater to the spot where the keeper's lamp had gone dark. There, in the weed, lay his lantern, still warm. Ada knelt and lifted it, and the owl dropped onto the stone beside her, folded its wings, and said in her dead mother's voice, plain as bread, that the sea keeps what it is owed and the rest it gives back split in two. Then it was gone.

They still say you can see it on the Cullery wall if you stand where the tide turns, the half-moon face watching the boats in and out, one eye on the living and one on the deep.