Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Owl in ornate frame on ribs
Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo
A tattoo of an owl with yellow eyes and dark feathered detail sits inside an ornate oval frame, with a small red heart above it. The linework is bold and the owl is mostly shaded in black and grey, with the eyes and heart adding colour. The tattoo is centred on the side of the ribs against a green top, with a hand with dark nail polish visible at the left edge.
Find an artist for thisTake 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
Nobody on Scarra believed the owl had been mine to keep, but the post office had been my mother's and the stamps were still in her tin, so the bird came with the building. It arrived in a wooden crate with a bill of lading that said only "one owl, handle gently", and by the time I'd prised the lid off, it was already glaring at me with eyes the colour of Dundee marmalade.
Keep reading
The frame was the odd part. It had come off a sea chest washed up at Hogha Bay the winter the Margaret went down, and Tam Gunn had nailed it to the back wall above the scales, saying a bird that watched the parcels should be framed like a saint. Each Thursday I dusted the scrolls with a feather duster and told the owl the mail was late. It never once blinked at me kindly.
In March the boat stopped coming for six weeks. The flour ran out, then the paraffin, and I sat up at night with a lamp and a stack of unfranked letters addressed to people who had already died. I wrote back to them in my own hand, the ink thinning in the cold. On the last night the owl dropped a field mouse on the counter, neat as a receipt, and I laughed until I cried.
The boat came in April. I sealed the letters with red wax, a heart pressed into each, and carried the whole bundle down to the pier myself.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.