Colour traditional tattoo of an owl with a sugar skull face and red roses on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Owl with sugar skull face on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold owl with outstretched teal and blue wings has a sugar skull face decorated with blue flower motifs and red roses. The thick outlines and saturated colour fill are typical of traditional work. The tattoo sits on the outer thigh of a person seated on a brown towel, with a hand resting on the fabric at the top left of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Owl Sugar skull Rose Wing Flower

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 owl came down onto the cabin roof the night we moored below Hythe lock, its wings half open, as if it were weighing up the boat. Dad said owls were bad luck on a working barge. Mum never said anything about luck. She only talked about the sugar skull she had carried aboard from a market in Lisbon, wrapped in a tea towel, with its painted cheeks and blue flowers across the brow. She set a candle beside it every November, and when she died in March the candle went out in the galley and nobody relit it.

Keep reading

The owl stayed three nights. I fed it strips of mackerel from the fishmonger's slab and it took them politely, one at a time, never looking at the plate. Its feathers were the blue-green of the canal in the mornings, rust at the tips where the light caught them, and whenever the barge swung on its chain, the head turned with the water rather than the boat. On the third evening I caught myself talking to it the way I used to talk to her, about the lock keeper who won't let anyone through before noon and the price of diesel in Brentford. It listened better than most people.

On the fourth morning the mist lay flat on the river and the roof was bare. There was one grey feather caught under the tiller and a red paint petal stuck to the rail. I went down to the galley, took the Lisbon skull off its hook and set it on the table beside an unlit candle. Then I filled the kettle, because somebody had to make the tea, and I left the second cup out for whatever might come back for it.