Pencil flash sketch of a cartoon owl with closed eyes perched on a branch, with leaves, snowflakes and small hearts around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleepy owl with snowflakes and branch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a cartoon owl with scalloped eyelids and a round, spotted head, perched on a curling branch. Leaves, hanging icicle-like shapes, snowflakes and two small hearts surround the bird. The linework is clean and sketched, shaded lightly in grey, with the design filling the page in a vertical composition.

Owl Snowflake Leaf Branch Heart

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 fair had packed up at Hallam Green in the second week of December, and by the time the frost came down the lorries sat nose to tail behind the old chapel, their canvas sheeted against the weather. Nobody expected to find anything living in the rigging of the Big Wheel, least of all a barn owl with its eyes shut tight, but Pa climbed up with a torch and swore he could hear it breathing.

Keep reading

I was sent up after him with a flask of tea and a bag of mince pies, because I was the only one small enough for the ladder cage. The owl sat on the crossbar as if it had paid for the seat. Its feathers were grey and dusted with rime, and its round head was speckled like a thrush's egg. When I put the torch on it, it opened one eye, looked at me as though I were late for something, then shut it again. Pa said that was the best ticket anyone had ever sold him.

The generator man wanted the wheel turned for the market lights on Saturday, and the owl would not be moved by shouting. So I lined an old apple crate with straw, slid it up the ladder with a broom handle and a great deal of cursing, and coaxed the bird across with a strip of mince pie crust. It went in without fuss, settled, and took up its sleep again, the soft hush of its breathing the only sound in the cold yard.

In the morning the crate was empty and the Big Wheel was rimed from hub to rim. On the frost of the cage door someone, or something, had pressed two small hearts into the white, and beside them the fine tracery of a branch. Pa never found the owl again. He still says it went off to find a warmer fair, and I have never once argued with him.