Colourful owl tattoo on an upper arm in a watercolour style, with green, blue, purple and orange ink perched on a branch.

Watercolour owl on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A green and blue owl with large amber eyes sits on a wooden branch, with its wings and tail drawn in purple, teal and orange. The linework is soft and the colour fades into loose splashes and drips around the figure, giving a painted watercolour effect. The owl is centred on the upper arm, with the arm and a white sleeve visible at the edges of the frame.

Upper arm Owl Branch Feather Watercolour Splashes

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 snow had been falling on the pass for three days when Teodor's flock turned back at the cairn, and the old ewe would not be pushed any further. He stood in the white with the lantern hanging from his wrist, counting sheep that were not there, and felt the cold work its way into his boots.

Keep reading

Above him, on a dead larch the wind had stripped to grey bones, an owl sat looking down. It was green where the lamp touched it and teal along its back, and when it shifted its wings the feathers showed violet and a dull orange at the edges, like a fire seen through wet glass. Its eyes were amber and steady. His grandmother had told him the pass kept an owl who knew the path, and that you should never thank it aloud, only walk where it looked.

So he watched. The owl turned its head, pointed one way and then the other, and dropped from branch to branch down a slope where a man could not otherwise have seen the edge. Wherever the snow lay smooth, a fine spray of colour lay on it like spilled paint, blue and green, and he followed those splashes until his boots found rock and then the track to the village lights.

At the bottom he turned to thank it anyway. The branch was empty. A single purple feather lay on the stone at his feet, and when he lifted it, the snow beneath melted in a bright bloom of colour. He kept it in his cap all the way home. Every autumn after, he carried the first bread of the year up to the cairn and set it on the stone, and it was always gone by morning.