Black and white line drawing of a stylised owl perched on a branch, with swirling tendrils, leaves and small hearts around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised owl on a branch with swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised owl sits on a curved branch, with large patterned eyes, chevron-marked wings and a solid black chest disc. Swirling tendrils, leaves and small outlined hearts fill the space around the bird. The image uses bold black outlines and solid black fills on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Owl Branch Swirl Heart Leaf Tendril

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

You reach Carrow Street Market just as the drizzle gives up pretending and becomes proper rain, bouncing off the striped awnings and running down the gutters in brown ribbons. Most stalls are packing up. Dilys Penhale's trestle is still lit by a bare bulb, and among the lost property she sells every Thursday sits an owl carved from driftwood.

Keep reading

It is painted in black and white, big-eyed and serious, with a solid dark disc on its chest and wings banded in sharp chevrons. Its branch curls at both ends like a question nobody finished asking. Dilys says the council sent it over in a box marked for the bin, with a luggage tag tied to one foot reading Do Not Sell, Please Keep Dry. You ask who wrote that. She shrugs at the rain. "Same person who left the umbrellas."

You turn the owl over. Underneath, someone has scratched a tiny heart and a date three winters back. Dilys watches you do the arithmetic and says nothing, which is how she always says the price is fair. You give her the coins in your pocket, all of them, and she counts them twice, then tips a handful of tin hearts from a biscuit tin into your palm as though they were change.

Walking home, you hold the owl under your coat, its carved swirls pressing against your ribs at every step. The rain keeps coming. Somewhere behind you Dilys is packing away the bulb, and in the box of lost things a pair of gloves is waiting for someone with cold hands to come back for them.