Owl perched on a stylised calligraphic branch

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a small owl with large round eyes and a pointed beak, perched on a horizontal stroke. The owl is linked to a looping, calligraphic stem with tapering strokes and clusters of solid dots at the top, middle and bottom. The design is in bold black linework on plain white paper, with no shading or colour.

Owl Branch Dot Calligraphy Swirl Bird

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the wet step, for the rock here remembers every foot that ever slipped on it. You want the story of the owl on the bent branch? Then hush, the tide is still making its noise, and I have only the one voice left in me.

Keep reading

Out on Skerra there was a sycamore that had no business growing in salt wind, and on its crooked limb sat a little brown owl with eyes like two pennies. Nobody on the island owned it. It came and went with the fog. When the boats were out, it would lift from that limb and fly down the cliff path with a scrap of folded paper knotted in its feathers, and it always found the right kitchen door, even in the dark.

Now the schoolmaster, Aonghas Fell, had a habit of writing letters he never sent. He wrote them in the blackest ink he had, every stroke tapering off like a tide going out, and he left them under stones along the shore. The owl took only the ones meant to be read. Nobody ever saw it choose. It simply knew which stones had been turned.

The winter the Margaret went down, the owl tapped at the schoolmaster's window with a letter in its beak. The hand was his own, dated the morning after the storm. It said only: count them, and do not leave one out. He went down to the shore with a lamp and found three black stones, wet as ink, lying where the swell had left them. He wrote their names on the back of the register, and the owl has sat on its branch ever since, waiting for the next page.