Bold black blackwork owl tattoo with ornate patterned eyes and wings, placed on the ankle and lower leg of a bare foot on a wooden floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal owl tattoo on a lower leg

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black owl sits on the outer lower leg above the ankle, with a broad head, spiral-patterned round eyes and a symmetrical body decorated with interior linework and ornamental detail. The design uses heavy solid fills and fine negative-space lines, with no colour ink. The photograph is taken from above and shows the foot with painted red toenails on a wooden plank floor.

Blackwork Ankle Owl Bird Ornamental Tribal pattern

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

Now mind, I'm only telling it the once, and you'll not ask me which bridge, because the bridge has been rebuilt four times since and the river has never forgiven any of them. Sit nearer the brazier. The owl was there before the lamps, perched on the cornice of the old wool exchange, and every night it counted the lamps as they were lit, a line of lamplighters climbing the streets with their long poles like men carrying thin black wands.

Keep reading

Its eyes were round and spiralled, like the coil of a watch spring, and it read those spirals as a ledger. Each turn was a debt. Lamplighter Ada Pirrie, whose father had died in the gasworks fire, owed the owl nine turns for a lamp she had let gutter on Tanner's Row. The owl asked for no coin. It asked for a name, one a night, of anyone who had lied to the watch.

Ada climbed the exchange steps with her pole and a loaf wrapped in a cloth. She set the loaf down. The owl studied her for a long while, its wings folded tight as a tailor's shears, and then it spoke in her father's voice. "Who dropped the match, Ada?"

She told it the truth, which was her own name, and the owl laughed like a rusted hinge. The nine turns unwound from its eyes one by one, and it lifted off over the roofs with the loaf forgotten on the stone. The lamps stayed lit all that winter. Some nights, if you stand on the exchange steps and hold your breath, you can still hear the wings counting.