Black and grey traditional tattoo of an owl wearing cat-eye glasses and perched on a stack of books, on a forearm.

Owl in cat-eye glasses on stacked books

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon-style owl wears cat-eye glasses with small red details on the frames and perches on a stack of three books. Bold black outlines and smooth grey shading give the feathers, claws and book spines their form, with soft highlights on the wings. The tattoo sits centrally on a forearm and fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Traditional Forearm Owl Glasses Book

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

Sit by the stove and mind it spits, for this is a long one and the wind is coming over the Sallow Pass tonight. Every border has a clerk, and ours was a grey owl named Brannoc, who sat on the customs hut's shelf atop three great ledgers, the oldest at the bottom. He wore spectacles with cat's-eye frames, red-tipped, that he had won off a travelling peddler in a card game nobody remembers losing.

Keep reading

Brannoc could read a lie the way a man holds his hat. Each spring the carts came up from the lowland with their papers, and each spring the officer, a tired man called Piet Harrow, would stamp whatever he was told. Brannoc did not stamp. He only blinked, slowly, behind those glasses, and the men with the false seals would suddenly find their boots very interesting.

One April a woman came up with a small girl and a box of bees, and no papers at all. Piet reached for his stamp. Brannoc shifted on the ledgers and tapped one page with his claw, a page from the year the valley had been split in two. There, in faded ink, was the girl's grandmother's name, and a line saying the family could cross whenever the owl permitted. Nobody had remembered it. Brannoc had kept it dry under the oldest book, where the damp could not reach.

So the woman crossed, and the bees, and the girl, and Piet never asked the owl for anything again. He just swept the hut and let the glasses do the reading. If you go up there tonight, mind the bottom ledger. Brannoc still keeps the names nobody else would write down.