Realism style black and grey owl tattoo on the side of a man's neck, with shaded feathers and staring eyes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl portrait on the neck

Realism · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic owl with ear tufts and a fixed, forward-facing stare fills the side of the neck, with its face and upper body shown. The linework is fine and the feathers are built up with dense black and grey shading that gives strong contrast and depth. The man wears a grey sleeveless top, and the plain pale background keeps focus on the tattoo.

Realism Neck Owl Feather Eye

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 closer, the lot of you, and mind the stove, it's the only warm thing on this boat. You want the one about the owl that wouldn't blink? Right. My grandmother's father worked the lock at Hatherby, where the Ouse goes brown and slow, and there was a tawny owl in the willow above the sluice gates that never once looked away from the water.

Keep reading

Every night he'd carry his lamp down the towpath and find that owl sat with its great round eyes fixed on the lower gate, as if it had money on the river rising. The lockkeepers said it watched for the flood. Others said it watched for the drowned, and kept count. Nobody asked it. You didn't ask an owl anything in that country.

One February the river came up black in a single night, the way it does when the rain has been falling on the hills for a week. The lower gate groaned. A narrowboat called the Patience was caught in the cut with a child asleep in the cabin, and the paddles had jammed. My great-great-grandfather stood on the beam with the rope in his hands and could not see the top of the water for the dark. Then he saw the owl drop from the willow and fly low over the boat, turning its head, round and steady, until he understood which side the gate would give.

He got the boat through. The owl went back to its branch and nobody ever saw it again, though the family kept an owl carved over the lock door for a hundred years after. Now, that's the story, and you can all go to bed.