Black and grey drawing of a detailed owl with spread wings above a sugar skull decorated with flowers and roses, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl and sugar skull with spread wings

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an owl with outstretched wings perched above a sugar skull, with a rose on each side of the skull and flowers over its eye sockets. The owl and skull are built from fine linework and stippled dot shading, while the wing feathers fade from dark to light. The design is centred on a plain white background in black ink and greys.

Dotwork Blackwork Owl Sugar skull Rose Flower Wing Feather

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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

The owl has been coming to the gallery rail for three weeks, and you have stopped shooing it away. Mr Penhallow, the relief keeper, says it is after the mice in the paraffin store, and you let him think so. Tonight the wind has swung round to the north-west and the lamp hums in its brass housing like a kettle that will not quite boil.

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Your mother kept a sugar skull on the sill of the cottage at Porth Dinas, a thing she had bought from a stall in Liverpool, its forehead iced with violet and two white flowers pressed over the eye sockets. She said the dead liked sweet things and bright things, and that they came back once a year to see who had kept the lamps lit. You never believed her, but you dusted it every Sunday for eleven years after the boat went down.

At two bells the owl drops off the rail and does not come back. You climb out after it, hand over hand along the cold iron, and find it on the lantern's dark side with its wings opened wide across the glass, as if it were holding the beam in place with its feathers. Below, the sea lies flat and grey as ink on wet paper. A boat's light wavers out past the Carrack, then steadies.

You stay beside it until the beam turns over the water and the shipping lane comes up clear. Then you lift it onto the rail and it gathers itself and goes, wings dark against the stars. Back in the watch room you open the logbook, and under the tide times you write one line: Lamp lit. Wind north-west. Owl came home.