Black ornamental design of an owl with spiral eyes and swirling filigree body perched on a curling branch with a heart-shaped chest, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirl owl perched on a branch

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised owl sits on a curled branch with two large spiral eyes, a small beak and a row of dots above the face. Its body is filled with fine curling scrolls that frame an open heart shape at the centre, and the branch ends in leaves and further spirals. The design is drawn in solid black linework on a plain off-white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Owl Heart Branch Swirl Spiral Leaves Dot

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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 closer, the lot of you, because the candles are short and I will not tell this twice. You want to know why Brother Anselm stopped drawing plain letters in the margins? Then hush and listen to the owl.

Keep reading

There was a copyist at the abbey of St Brannoc, above the salt marshes, who could not finish a page without a scroll creeping out from the initial letter and curling off into nothing. The abbot scolded him every week. The vellum was dear, he said, and the Psalms did not want ivy. So Anselm worked through the nights with the shutters open, and one night an owl landed on the branch of the damson tree outside the window and watched him with two round eyes that were already spirals of their own.

Every night after that the owl came, and every night Anselm copied a little less carefully and drew a little more. He left a heart-shaped gap in the middle of his lettering, the way a baker presses a thumb into dough, and he never told the abbot what it was for. The owl sat on its crooked branch and waited for the curls to be finished, and when the bell for Matins rang it lifted off without a sound.

In the spring the abbot found the Gospel book open on the lectern, every margin scrolled and dotted with black ink, and in the middle of the page a clean white heart where the words should have been. He held it up to the window for a long while. Then he said nothing, and sent Anselm out to the damson tree with a fresh pot of ink and told him to draw the owl the way it looked at him.