Colour tattoo of a sleepy purple owl with closed eyes perched on a black branch with pink blossoms, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple owl on a branch on the upper back

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The tattoo shows a purple owl with closed eyes and a small orange beak, perched on a black branch. Pink blossoms with dark centres sit along the branch to the lower left. The owl is outlined and filled with soft shading in lilac and purple, with simple scale marks on the chest and wings, and the design is centred on the upper back.

Back Owl Bird Branch Blossom Flower

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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 owl in the north tower has been asleep since before the roof came down, and nobody at Harrowgate Keep has had the nerve to wake her. You are the one sent up with a bucket of lime wash and a clipboard from the council, and the clipboard says nothing about birds. Still you climb, one rung at a time, past the stone where the stair used to turn, until the wind comes through the broken arrow slit carrying the smell of wet bracken and cold ash.

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She is perched on a dead ash limb that someone dragged up here generations ago, and the damp has coaxed pink blossom out of the grey bark, little flowers with dark hearts like spilt ink. Her eyes are shut tight. Her beak is the colour of a marmalade jar in a winter kitchen. You set the bucket down very quietly, which is a foolish thing to do for a bird, and she does not stir.

Downstairs, the caretaker's ledger from 1911 says the owl arrived the same spring as the blossom, and that the last lady of the house, Eleanor Vane, decreed that the north tower was never to be painted until the owl woke of her own accord. Nobody has kept that rule for a hundred years, and you are not about to start a quarrel with a bird. You dip the brush anyway and work along the far wall, the lime wash going on pale and clean, but you leave a border of old stone around the branch no wider than your thumb.

By the end of the week the council letter arrives saying the north tower is deferred indefinitely. You climb up one last time to tell her. She has not moved. A single pink petal has fallen onto the sleeve of your coat, and you carry it all the way down the stairs, pressed between two fingers, as if it were a letter she had asked you to deliver.