Black and grey realism tattoo of an owl's face and wings on the upper arm and shoulder, held beside a printed reference photo of the same owl.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic owl's face and feathered wings are tattooed across the upper arm and shoulder, with fine feather detail and soft grey shading around the eyes. Beside the arm, a gloved hand holds a printed black and white reference photo of an owl, which shows a similar head angle and tonal range. The composition sits the skin and the printout side by side against a plain background.

Realism Upper arm Owl Feather Eye Wing

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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

Brother Anselm had given up on the cats. They sat along the lectern like bored bishops and did nothing about the mice gnawing the vellum edges of the Fenwick Psalter, so when the abbot's letter arrived asking for the book to be copied before the damp got into it, Anselm walked down to the village and asked the blacksmith's widow for her owl.

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Her name was Mrs Harrow and the owl was called Gideon, a tawny with a face like a dinner plate and eyes the colour of weak tea. She said he had come in through a broken shutter in January and had never quite left. She settled him on Anselm's forearm, and though he weighed less than the binding cord, he turned that enormous head slowly and looked at Anselm as if weighing his soul and finding it a little damp.

That night the scriptorium was quiet except for the scratch of Anselm's pen and the soft rustle from the rafters. Gideon dropped without a sound onto the sill, then onto the flagstones, then into the shadow beneath the shelves. By matins the mice had stopped. By lauds there was a small grey heap by the door that Anselm did not look at too closely.

He finished the copy in three weeks. In the margin of the last folio he drew the bird's face in fine strokes, feathers laid one over another, the round eyes fixed on whoever read it. When the abbot came to inspect the work, he paused over that page for a long time. "Who is that?" he asked. Anselm, who had sat up every night with a stub of candle and a bird that never blinked, said only, "The night watch."