Colourful watercolour-style owl tattoo perched on a branch with pink blossoms, placed on the side of the torso near the navel.

Watercolour owl on a branch

Other · Colour · Photo

A large-eyed owl with blue, red and green patterned wings perches on a thin branch decorated with small pink flowers. The linework is soft and the shading blends into loose splashes of blue, pink and green in the background. The colour ink dominates the composition, which is centred on the owl against bare skin and a checked shirt at the top of the frame.

Other Owl Branch Blossom Flower Swirl Splashes

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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 down, the lot of you, the urn hasn't boiled and I haven't got to the owl yet. Yes, that owl. Some of you were in Form Four when Mr Abney kept it in a biscuit tin on the windowsill, and you swore it had been painted by a rainbow that had lost its way home.

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It came from the paint box of a girl called Nell Pardoe, who was given the bottom shelf of the art room because nobody else wanted it. Her paints were cheap and always running. She'd mix a blue that bled into a green, then a red that bled into the blue, and Mr Abney said that was no way to do a proper picture. Nell said the wet was the point. She painted the owl on a Tuesday in March, when the blossom outside the window had just gone pink, and she gave it eyes so round the caretaker complained they were looking at him.

Then the summer the school flooded, the owl went missing. Abney blamed the cleaners. Nell said nothing, only drew a branch on the back of her hand every morning until the ink wore off. Years later, a parcel arrived at the old gatehouse with a single postcard showing a wing, a flower, and the words still perched, if you're looking.

So the owl is not lost. It sits in a drawer in Nell's kitchen, wrapped in a tea towel that once belonged to Mr Abney. Nobody here needs to go and fetch it. The kettle's on now. Mind the squash, it's terrible.