Neo-traditional owl tattoo with spread grey wings and red eyes, holding a red faceted gem, on a person's chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with spread wings on the chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large owl with outstretched wings sits across the chest, its body and wings rendered in black and grey with detailed feather shading. The owl has red eyes and clutches a red faceted gem at the centre of the composition. The black and grey work dominates, with the red providing a single strong accent against the pale skin.

Neo-trad Chest Owl Wing Gem Bird Feather

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

The last waltz had finished twenty minutes ago, and you were still on your knees under the bandstand, picking sequins out of the floorboards with a bent hairpin. Mrs Okafor's ruby brooch should have been in the cloakroom tin. Instead it had gone missing somewhere between the foxtrot and the interval, and the band were packing up with their eyes on the door.

Keep reading

Something moved in the rafters above the mirror ball. Two red-rimmed eyes, bright as copper coins, turned to find you. The Pavilion had always had an owl. Dennis the caretaker said it had flown in through a broken pane in 1952 and never found the nerve to leave. You had never liked it. It watched the dancers the way a bailiff watches a tab.

You climbed the ladder with the torch clamped in your teeth. The owl did not fly. It sat with its wings half open, and in its talons, wedged between a beam and a coil of dead fairy lights, was the brooch. Its facets caught your torch and threw little drops of red across the plaster. 'Give that here,' you said, though you were not sure which of you you were talking to. The owl clicked its beak once, which was no answer at all.

You reached for it, and the bird let you take it, but only after you had been close enough to see the dust on its breast. Then it opened its wings across the full width of the hall, and every loose strand of tinsel shivered. When the air settled, the brooch was warm in your palm and the rafter was bare. Mrs Okafor got her brooch back the following Saturday. The cloakroom tin was never short again, and Dennis still swears the owl comes back to check on it.