Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a pink and orange owl with large round eyes, green scrolling vines and small flowers, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with green vines on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stylised owl with large round eyes, a small heart on its head and a scalloped feather pattern stands among green scrolling vines and small orange flowers. The linework is bold and outlined, with the body and eye rings filled in pink, orange, yellow and green. The owl is centred on the calf, with the vines curling around its sides and base.

Neo-trad Calf Owl Vine Flower Heart Feather Leaves

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

You have been told twice now to leave the owl alone, so you lean in closer instead, nose almost to its painted feathers. Mrs Abney keeps it on the water butt at the bottom of her allotment, a clay thing once pink and now the colour of old sherbet, and she says it keeps an eye on the beans. You are seven. You think it keeps an eye on you.

Keep reading

The vines are the trouble. All summer they have crept up the butt and over the lid, sprouting orange flowers no bigger than shirt buttons, and nobody has had the heart to cut them back. Mrs Abney says the little heart on the owl's head is there for a reason, though she will not say what. When the rain comes sideways across the plots, you run for the shed with the others and never look back, which is how you miss the moment the owl turns its great round eyes toward the gate.

Next morning the lid is off the butt and the water is low and still. Mrs Abney is kneeling in the mud with a trowel, not digging, just staring. Tucked between the scalloped feathers of the owl's wing, where the paint has chipped, sits a single green leaf, fresh as a new thought. She presses it into your palm without a word, the way you would hand over a coin you had found in the path.

You take it home and flatten it between the pages of your reading book. Years later you still cannot say whether the owl moved or the vines did, only that the bean rows came up straight that year, every one of them, and Mrs Abney swore the owl had been keeping watch the whole time.