Black linework design with pink and blue pencil shading of a sugar skull woman wearing an owl headdress, with feathers and beaded chains, drawn on paper.

Owl and sugar skull portrait design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a woman's face with sugar skull style face markings, topped by an owl with red-rimmed eyes. Feathers frame the figure, and strings of beads hang below the face and on each side. The bold black linework is accented with soft pink and blue pencil shading on a pale background.

Neo-trad Owl Sugar skull Woman Portrait Feather Bead Ornament

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 bell at Ashgrove Wharf had rung nine when the owl came down off the cable tower and sat on the rim of the water tank, as it did every night the wind came from the east. Mara Kell was already there with her pails. She did not look up. Everybody in the sunken town knew the owl belonged to the old keeper, and that the old keeper had been dead eleven winters, but nobody said so to its face.

Keep reading

The rule was simple, her grandmother had told her: keep the lamp lit, keep the beads wet, and never count the feathers. The beads were glass, strung on fine wire, and they hung from the lamp hook down to the floor so the light caught them and threw small moons across the dormitory walls. Mara had strung forty-one of them that spring. The owl watched every one with eyes ringed in rust-red, the colour of the iron pipes that still ran under the dunes.

On the ninth night the lamp guttered and the room went black. Something moved along the wire, bead by bead, the way a hand counts a rosary. Mara struck a match and saw the owl had dropped one glass moon into her palm. It was warm from its feathers.

She understood then that the counting had been for her, and that the keeper had never been dead, only out past the dunes mending the sky with spare glass. She hung the bead back on its hook and kept the lamp burning until the east wind turned.