Colour tattoo of a owl with a clock face on its chest and a branch beneath it, on the upper arm, in green, yellow and red.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with clock face on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large owl sits on a branch, with bold green plumage, yellow-orange eyes and a ring of red dots around them. A clock face is set into its chest, and fine shading gives the feathers depth. The tattoo covers much of the upper arm against a dark background.

Neo-trad Upper arm Owl Clock Branch Eye Feather

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

The wedding at Hollin Cross was set for the hour after the church bell, and Mabel Crane had insisted on the owl hour, when the barn owls came out over the water meadows. Her father, the clockmaker, had wound every clock in the village that morning, and he still held his pocket watch to his ear as the carriage came up the lane.

Keep reading

The bride's grandmother had told her that the owl in the great oak by the lychgate kept a bargain with the parish. Every hundred years it took one hour from the village and held it safe, so that no couple married under that tree would be parted before the clock ran out. Nobody took this seriously until the groom, Tom Harrow, stopped halfway through his vows and asked the vicar how long they had been standing there.

The owl sat on the lychgate beam with eyes like lamp glass and a ring of red berries pinned round them, and it said nothing. Mabel's father stepped forward, opened the face of his watch, and held it up to the bird. "Keep the hour," he said, "but take the one we are not using." The owl blinked once. Tom laughed, the choir started again, and the bells rang eleven minutes late, which everyone agreed was the finest wedding the parish had seen.

Forty years on, Mabel still checked the church clock against her husband's watch every Sunday and found them always a little behind. On their anniversary she opened her father's old drawer and found a spare hour lying there, its hands stopped at noon, with one green feather laid across the dial.