Black linework owl with ornate patterned wings perched on a branch with leaves, with red watercolour wash, tattooed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl on a branch across the upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A stylised owl with large round eyes and ornate patterned wings sits on a branch that extends to the right, ending in a sprig of leaves. The owl is drawn in bold black linework with fine hatching and dotted detail, and a faint dotted circle sits behind its head. Soft red and pink wash spreads around the branch and beneath the owl, and the tattoo is centred on the upper back.

Botanical Back Owl Branch Leaves Dotted circle Ornament Watercolour wash

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

You have been climbing the north stair of Carrow Keep since the bell stopped, counting the broken steps because counting keeps your knees steady. The wind comes through the arrow slits as if it has a grudge. Below, the lord's garden has gone to nettle, and only the old yew still holds its shape.

Keep reading

The owl is waiting on a beam above the chapel roof, where the lead has peeled back to the rafters. Her eyes are round and ringed like the wheels of a cart, and her wings are cut in scrolls and fern-leaf whorls that Brother Anselm once told you were copied from the lintel of the chapel door. She has not moved since you came in. You suspect she has not moved since the last steward died.

You ask her what the castle wants from you. She shakes out her feathers and lets fall a single red one, which drifts down through the gap and lands on the flagstones, where the rain has been wearing it away for longer than anyone has kept a record. The beam she sits on was once the bar of the portcullis. Rust has eaten the iron everywhere except at one end, where a sprig of hawthorn has pushed up through a crack and stayed green. Above the roofline hangs a faint ring of dots, the same ones the monks pricked into the parchment to mark the hours.

You reach up and take the sprig, leaving the bar where it lies. The owl lifts without a sound, and the dots above the roof come loose and fall into the courtyard like seed, settling in the nettles until the whole yard looks like it is keeping time.