Owl silhouette tattoo filled with stars, a soft pink nebula and a full moon, on the forearm in dark blue ink.

Owl silhouette filled with night sky

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A perched owl silhouette with ear tufts and a full moon above its head, with the body filled by a starry night sky. White dot stars and soft pink and violet clouds sit within dark navy and black ink, with clean outer edges against pale skin. The composition is centred and vertical, with a red, white and blue braided bracelet visible at the bottom of the frame.

Forearm Owl Moon Star Galaxy Night sky Nebula Branch

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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

I took the Hallow Gap post the winter the lower road flooded, because nobody else would sit alone at the top of the pass with a lamp and a logbook. My job was to count the lorries over the crest and write down anything that looked wrong. Mostly nothing did. The owl came to the stunted rowan beside the hut on my third night, a big grey-brown thing with ear tufts like a pair of folded knives, and it sat on the same bare branch every evening after that, watching me the way a magistrate watches a witness.

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On the fourth night the moon was so full it threw my shadow across the snow. The owl turned its head and looked past my shoulder, down the valley, and I heard it before I saw anything: a cart, no lamps, coming up the old drovers' track where no cart should go. I counted four horses and a woman in a green cloak. I wrote it down. The owl stayed put, and so did I, and the cart went by below us into the dark without stopping at the hut.

I kept the page. In the morning the rowan had dropped its last berries and the owl was gone, though a single white feather lay on the branch, speckled with black like a night sky cut small. I never learned who the woman was, or why she needed a road no one remembered. I only know the moon was on the snow, and the bird had been waiting for someone to notice.