Small black and grey owl tattoo with large eyes perched on a branch, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small owl on a branch on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cartoon-style owl sits on a thin curved branch, with large round eyes, tufted head feathers and a textured body filled with swirl and scale-like marks. The linework is bold and the grey shading is soft, giving the owl some depth against the pale skin. The tattoo is centred on the photo with a plain, slightly out-of-focus background.

Forearm Owl Branch Bird

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 last train to Hollin Cross had pulled out twenty minutes earlier, and the platform lamps had settled into their tired buzz. You were counting the lost property on the hook behind the ticket office: two umbrellas, a child's mitten, a violin case nobody had claimed since March. Above the footbridge, something shifted in the dead hawthorn that leaned over the fence, and when you lifted the torch there was an owl, round-eyed and faintly put out, sitting on the branch as if it had bought a ticket and was waiting to be told where to go.

Keep reading

Mr Pennock, who had run the station before you and still came in on Sundays to check the gutters, used to say owls made the best night staff because they never asked for overtime and never mislaid a signal. He had kept a biscuit tin under the counter for the roosting birds, and the tin was still there, rattling with the dry crumbs of his habit. You tipped a digestive onto the platform edge. The owl considered it, turned its head through a full half circle, and ignored it entirely.

The signal changed to green at five past five, and the first freight rumbled in with its lamp burning like a coin. The owl dropped from the branch, unfolded its wings over the track and went low after the light, past the goods shed and out over the water meadows, until you could not tell it from the mist.

By the time the milk train came through, you had found a single ticket for the 5:40 folded inside the violin case, punched with a neat round hole in the corner. Nobody had travelled on it. You put it on the hook with the umbrellas and wrote the date beneath it, because that was the job, and because somebody would surely come back for it.