Colour tattoo of a watercolour-style owl perched on a branch, with blue, purple and orange washes and splatters, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour owl on a branch

Calf · Colour · Photo

A large owl with wide amber eyes perches on a branch, drawn with fine dark linework and soft shading in blue and grey. Loose washes of purple, teal and orange bleed outwards from the figure, with dark ink splatters scattered around the edges. The design wraps around the leg and is set against a plain pale background.

Calf Owl Branch Feather Splatter Watercolour

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 cook aboard the coaster Marigold had a rule about the owl, and the rule was that nobody fed it from the pot. Old Hanna Pryce kept the galley stove and the salt cod, and she kept the owl too, though nobody had ever seen her call it. It came in off the foresail at dusk and perched on the brass rail above the flour bin, turning its wide amber eyes on whoever was stirring.

Keep reading

One February the sea ran so high that the hatch boards split, and water came into the lower hold like a grey animal. The mate wanted the lamps out. Hanna wanted the stove lit, because a cold crew makes poor sailors, she said, and a hot pot keeps a man's mind on his feet. She lit it with pine cones she had carried in her apron since autumn. The owl watched the smoke climb the funnel and made no sound.

When the wind dropped at the turn of the night, the boy Tobias found the tiller rope frayed through and nobody at the wheel. He ran for the galley. Hanna was already there with the ladle in her hand, and the owl had come down off the rail onto the copper lid, where the steam wrapped round it like a river round a stone. "Go on, then," she told it. It lifted and flew up through the hatch, and the boy swore afterwards that he saw a trail of blue and violet light behind it, the way spilt paint runs on wet paper.

They made Lowestoft by morning with the rope spliced and the boards nailed. Hanna scraped the copper clean and set a single bowl of oats on the sill, the way she always did, and the owl took it without looking at her. The mate called it a sign. Hanna said it was only an owl that had got used to being fed, and that was the trouble with anything that stayed.