Black and grey realism tattoo of an owl with spread wings across the shoulder and upper chest of a person in a green top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with spread wings on shoulder and chest

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic owl with wide-spread wings is tattooed across the shoulder and upper chest. The feathers are rendered with fine, detailed linework and layered grey shading, with dark banding on the wing tips. The image is a close crop with warm lighting, and the only colour is the green top at the bottom edge.

Realism Shoulder Chest Owl Wing Feather Bird

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, before the sherry goes warm. No, Derek, you were never going to be the tallest, and that's no reason to stand at the back like a coat stand. Right. The owl. Everybody remembers the owl, even those of you who swore on your mothers' graves you'd never set foot in Ashcombe Lane again.

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It came to the chapel roof the spring of the fire, when the bell rope had rotted and nobody would climb up for it. Mrs Pyle said it was a barn owl, pale as a dinner plate, and Miss Garrod said it was a witch's familiar and we were not to look at it. We looked at it all the same. We watched it lift off the parapet with both wings opened wide as a door, and every one of us went quiet, because a bird that size makes you feel like the smallest thing in the county.

Here is the bit you won't like. Tomas Bright went up the ladder that Friday with a paper bag of mice he'd bought off the butcher. He came down with his sleeve torn and one grey feather stuck to his cheek, and he never once told us what the owl said to him. He just grew up, and left, and sent postcards from places with no owls at all.

So raise your glasses to Tomas, who is not here, and to the feather he kept in a biscuit tin. Some of us still hear wings over the car park at night. I'd tell you it means something, but I'm too old to be sure, and the sherry's gone warm.