Black line drawing design of an owl with a keyhole-shaped ornate lock on its chest, holding a key in its talons, with faint flowers behind, in a Neo-trad style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with keyhole and key line drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a front-facing owl with wide eyes and feathered wings, with an ornate keyhole-shaped lock on its chest and a small decorative key gripped in its talons. Faint flower outlines sit behind the wings and at the sides. The work uses clean black outlines with fine hatching and scrollwork detail, and no colour or shading is applied on the cream paper.

Neo-trad Owl Keyhole Lock Key Flower Feather Talon

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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

You have the ring of keys in your coat pocket by the time the lift shudders to a stop on the eleventh floor, and the owl is already waiting on the rail outside 1104, turning its head the way a bailiff turns to a late tenant. Its eyes are wide and unblinking. Someone has painted the landing walls the colour of weak tea since you were last up here, but nobody has touched the bird.

Keep reading

Thelma Brand handed the flat back to the council in March and left her instructions in pencil on the back of a gas bill: check the owl, it knows the door. You took it for the sort of thing a lonely woman writes after a long winter. Inside, the carpet is up, the curtains are gone, and there is one pale rectangle on the wallpaper where a clock once hung. Your keys do nothing to the front door. When you crouch to look closer, the owl's chest shows a keyhole, scrolled round with iron filigree like the lid of an old music box.

The small brass key from the bottom of Thelma's envelope fits it perfectly. The panel beneath the rail swings open with a click you feel in your back teeth, and inside is a biscuit tin tied with string. Letters, a savings book in her name, and a photograph of a man in a railway cap standing beside a bird on a fence post. You read the first letter standing up, then the second, until the stairwell light clicks off and you have to feel your way back to the lift.

When you look up from the landing, the owl has its talons round nothing at all, and its wings are folded tight. You lock the tin in the panel, close the iron door, and leave the key in its chest where it belongs.