Small watercolour-style barn owl tattoo in purple, pink and blue tones on the side of the ribs, with a starry pattern across its head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small barn owl tattoo on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A small barn owl faces left in a painted, watercolour-like style, with its pale heart-shaped face outlined in soft purple and its body shaded in pink, orange and blue. The upper head carries a speckled starry pattern, and the lines fade softly at the edges rather than forming hard outlines. The tattoo sits alone on pale skin against the edge of an orange garment, with plenty of empty space around it.

Ribs Owl Barn owl Bird Star Galaxy

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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

Sit down on the wall, the both of you, and mind the wasps in the windfalls. Dusk is when the owl comes out, and you'll want to see her before the light goes. Her name was Mabel, though the orchard folk called her the Vicar, on account of the white collar of her face and the way she sat so still and judged the mice.

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Back in the August of the year the plums came heavy, Mabel lived in the loft of the cider barn, and every night she flew out over the trees to hunt the long grass between the rows. One night she dropped low over the pond to take a moth off the water, and the moth was not a moth at all but a bit of the Milky Way that had come loose and tumbled down the sky like a spilt bag of sugar. It stuck to her head. Little specks of it, purple and silver, caught in the feathers above her eyes, and they've never come out.

Old Tom Penrose, who kept the pickers' ledger, swore he saw her come back from the pond glowing like a lantern. He wrote it in the book, under the day's count of baskets, and the book's still in the shed if you doubt me.

So when you see her lift from the gate tonight, look at her crown first. That's where the sky got in. Then watch her go out over the apples, pale as a dinner plate, and count the stars you can see on her head. There'll be more than you think, and every one of them is a bit of somewhere else.