Pen and ink sketch of a round-eyed owl perched on a leafy branch, drawn on aged paper as a tattoo-style design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl perched on a branch

Black and grey · Flash

A large-eyed owl sits upright on a twisted branch with small leaves sprouting from it. The linework is fine and sketchy, with hatching on the wings and soft shading around the eyes and chest. The drawing is in black ink on a stained, sepia-toned paper background, and the owl fills the centre of the composition.

Owl Branch Leaves Bird

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

Tuesday, 14th January. Snow to the sills again and the lane under it. Mother says we have eleven beds taken and the carrier from Carlisle will not come before the thaw, so it is only us, the travellers and Mister Tallow. He is the barn owl who roosts on the iron hook above the kitchen door, and he watches every guest who comes in stamping and swearing at the cold with the same round, unblinking look, as if he is adding them up.

Keep reading

The surveyor arrived at dusk with frost in his moustache and a leather case he would not set down, not even to eat. He paid for his room in coins he counted twice on the bar, then once more when he thought I was not looking. He asked after the old pit road that climbs behind the church, and when Father said nobody has walked it since the roof fell in, he only nodded and unfolded a map so yellow with damp that the ink had run into the hills. Tallow came down from his hook to the back of the settle to see it. The surveyor did not flinch. I thought that strange, for most men do.

I woke at three to the sound of the back door. The lamp was still lit in the passage and the surveyor's bed was empty, the blanket folded square, a single penny set on the sill beside it. Tallow's hook was empty too. I went out in my stockings and found their prints in the snow, one man's and one owl's, climbing towards the church in a line that wandered where a sensible path would not. By morning the snow had filled them in.

Father says the cold took him, and the map with him. I have put the penny in the tin with the other tokens nobody can spend. The hook above the door stays bare, and when the wind works at the shutters I still look up at it, as if someone might be counting.