Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of an owl with a sugar skull on the forearm, with bold outlines and detailed shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and sugar skull on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large owl with spread wings and a feathered tail frames a sugar skull at the centre of the forearm. The skull has a heart on its forehead and floral patterns over its eyes, and the owl's feathers are rendered with fine, detailed linework. The piece uses only black ink and grey shading against a plain, pale background.

Neo-trad Forearm Owl Sugar skull Heart Feather Wing Floral

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

The snow had buried the road to Thornmere by the third night, and Bea Ostler counted her candles the way her mother had counted sheep. Eleven left. The owl on the beam above the kitchen door had not moved since supper, its round eyes fixed on the guest who had come in off the moor with frost in his beard and a tin box under his arm.

Keep reading

He called himself Mr Yardley and paid in silver, which was why she let him sit near the hearth. He opened the tin only once, when the fire had sunk to embers. Inside lay a sugar skull, a paper heart pressed to its brow and white icing flowers ringing its eyes, gone the colour of weak tea with age. "My sister made it," he said. "Every November, for the dead. She died in the Lantern Pass in March, and I have carried her across every winter since."

Bea did not believe him, and then the owl dropped from the beam, soft as a moth, and settled on the lid of the tin. It looked at the skull for a long while. Then it looked at Mr Yardley, and he went very still, the way men do when a thing they have been avoiding finally speaks. The owl lifted the paper heart in its hooked beak and carried it out through the gap in the shutters into the blue dark.

At dawn the plough had cleared the road and the moor lay pale and empty. Mr Yardley had gone before the cocks. On the tin's lid lay one grey feather and the skull, bare of its heart. Bea kept the feather in the till drawer, and each November, when the snow came early, she set a candle in the window for whoever might still be walking.