Realism tattoo of an owl with an orange eye and a skull on a man's upper arm and shoulder, with the words POWER and WISDOM and red sketch lines.

Owl and skull upper arm tattoo

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm and part of the shoulder, showing a shaded owl with a glowing orange eye in front of a skull. The words POWER and WISDOM appear in bold black block lettering behind the design. Fine red sketch lines cross the background, and the rest of the piece is in black and grey shading against a dark backdrop.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Owl Skull 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, the lamp's going to gutter before I'm done, and you'll not want to hear the rest in the dark. This is about Harrow Lane, the night the gas went out across the whole of Tanner's Quarter. Everybody blamed the owl on the chimney of the Corn Exchange. Nobody thought to blame the man who sold the lamp oil.

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Mab Trewin kept the night ledger for the cold store under the old wool market. She wrote down every crate, every sack, every soul who came down the steps after the bell. She had a red pencil for the things that didn't add up, and by the autumn of that year the page was more red than black. Her brother had gone to the works and not come home, and she had decided, the way clever women decide things, that the answer was in the numbers.

On the last night she followed the lines. Red pencil ran from the cold store to the Exchange, from the Exchange to the bell tower, and at the top stood the owl, its eye like a coin of lamplight, watching her climb. It did not blink. Beside it on the sill sat a skull, polished smooth by years of rain, and beneath them, cut into the old stone, two words: POWER, and under that, WISDOM. She understood then that the ledger had never been about money. The owl had simply been waiting for her to read it properly.

She crossed out the last red line and wrote her brother's name in ink at the foot of the page, and in the morning the gas came back on.