Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing two owls, shaded roses, leaves and a crescent moon.

Owls, roses and crescent moon on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large black and grey tattoo on the upper arm of a woman with long blonde hair. The design shows two owls with shaded faces and wings, a crescent moon, and two shaded roses with leaves and a sprig of foliage. The soft shading and fine detail are set against a blurred indoor background.

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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 die has cracked across the owl's left wing, and the master says no honest merchant will take a coin with a split bird on it, so before the forge fires again you must cut a new one from the bronze blank. Your fingers are still grey with the clay of the crucible. Beyond the mint wall the moon hangs thin above the Hymettus hills, and you have until the first silver is weighed in the agora.

Keep reading

Use the small chisel with the bone grip. Work from the eyes outward, because the buyers check the eyes first, and Athena's bird must look back at them without blinking. Your teacher taught you that. So give the owl a ruff of fine strokes like the petals of a rose you once saw pressed between the pages of a letter from Miletus. Cut a sprig of olive above its head, and beside it, where the flan curls, a crescent moon no wider than your smallest nail.

When the foreman's snoring rolls across the workshop, you cut a second owl on the reverse, turned to face the first, sharing a single wing. It is not in the commission. It is a little theft, and your hands shake on the final strokes. A rose blooms in the corner of the field, shaded deep at its heart, where no magistrate with a lens will think to look.

At dawn the coins go out in their leather pouches. Weeks later a stranger presses one into your palm at the well, grinning, and turns it over to show you the rose hidden under the bird's wing. You close your fist around the silver, warm from his hand, and say nothing at all.

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