Black line drawing of an owl with spread wings, a skull, roses and leaves, shown as a fine line tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Owl with skull and roses design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an owl with wings spread wide, its face centred above an all-seeing eye set in a triangle. Below the owl sits a skull framed by two roses and sprigs of leaves. The linework is thin and even on a plain white background, with feathers and petals drawn in layered scalloped detail.

Fine line Botanical Owl Wing Skull Rose Leaves Eye Triangle Feather

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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

The lift on Ward Nine stuck again at ten past three, so I took the stairs with a trolley of clean linen and the radio hissing about a fall in Bay C. Nobody says the night porter's name after midnight. They call me the one with the keys, which suits me fine. I hold every fire door in the east wing, and I know which of them sticks when it rains.

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Dorothy in bed fourteen has been awake since the handover. She retired from the dispensary after forty years and still counts the bedpans the way she used to count tablets, under her breath. Tonight she wanted the window latch checked, then the blind, then the window again. When I came back she had a biro and the back of a prescription pad, and she was drawing an owl with its wings out wide as a doorway. Above its face she put a triangle with an eye in it. 'That's the eye that never shuts,' she said. 'Pharmacists are taught it means the stock room is watched.' She laughed until her chest hurt, then told me to fetch the pink roses off the windowsill, the ones the florist left with a card that said Get Well, which she said was rude given the company.

By five the sky over the car park had gone the colour of weak tea. A tawny owl sat on the barrier arm, unbothered by the ticket machine, and I stood in the cold with my torch off and watched it open its wings as if checking they still worked. Then it dropped away over the bins without a sound.

I went back up and wrote the time in the logbook: 05:12, owl on barrier, all quiet on Ward Nine. Dorothy was asleep with the drawing folded under her hand. I left the latch alone.