Colourful owl tattoo with dreamcatcher eyes and purple, pink and blue feathers running down the outer leg, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with dreamcatcher eyes on a leg

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large owl is tattooed on a leg, with its eyes formed by circular dreamcatcher webs outlined in blue and filled with fine black lines. Its body is built from layered feathers and beaded strands in purple, pink and blue, with dark shading behind them. Bold outlines and saturated colour fill the frame, and the design is centred on the leg with the feathered tips falling towards the bottom edge.

Neo-trad Thigh Owl Dreamcatcher Feather Eye Bead

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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

Dear Kwame, the owl is back on the rail outside the ninth floor landing, the one you used to call the purple one. Mrs Adeyemi says it has come every October since the tower was built, and she is probably right, because nobody else on this estate looks up long enough to notice it. Its eyes are the round webs from Mr Pryce's old dreamcatcher, the one he hung in the stairwell after Maureen passed. He took it down in the spring and I never saw where it went. Now the owl wears it.

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The children have decided the beads on its feathers are counters. Every night the little Okafor boy stands under the lamp and tells me how many are left, and every night the number is different, because the wind keeps lifting the strands and letting them fall again. He says they are rain you can hold. I told him rain does not stay in one place for long, and he looked at me as if I had said something very stupid.

Last night I went out on the landing in my slippers, and the owl turned its head all the way round, slow as a clock hand. The black lines in its eyes caught the light from the car park, and for a moment I could see straight through them into the flats, every window lit, every kettle going, everybody awake at once. Then it opened its wings and the feathers fell down the face of the block like a curtain being drawn, pink, then violet, then blue.

I have left the landing window open an inch. Mrs Adeyemi says that is how you let a thing know it can come in if it wants. Write when you can.

Love, Nan