Colourful owl tattoo on the inner forearm, drawn in soft blue, purple, pink and green with dripping paint-like edges.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style owl on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small owl faces forward, its head and body shaded in soft blues, purples, pinks and greens. Dark speckles and thin coloured drips run down from the body, and a few small dots sit above the head. The tattoo sits on a forearm against a teal top and patterned shorts.

Forearm Owl Splatter Drip Star

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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

The frost had come down so hard on the yard that the water trough skinned over by four o'clock, and Mam still insisted on painting at the kitchen table with the stove door open. She had a tin of watercolours older than me and a jam jar that she filled from the kettle every morning. When I asked what she was doing, she said she was trying to catch the barn owl before it left us for good.

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The owl had been roosting in the far bay since October. I only ever saw it as a pale shape lifting off the bales when I came in with the lamp, its face turned toward me like a dinner plate someone had forgotten to wash. Dad said it was after the mice. Mam said it was after nothing, that owls only came to a place when they had decided it was theirs. She wet the paper twice, let the blues bleed into the lilacs, then dropped a thin green line down the middle of the sheet to show where the rain had got to it.

When the thaw came, the whole barn dripped for three days. The sheet she'd pinned above the sink curled at the corners and the owl ran down the wall in long streaks, its stars gone soft and grey. Mam stood there with a cloth in her hand and laughed, which I hadn't heard her do since the autumn. I took the torch out to the bay that night, expecting nothing. The owl was sitting on the highest rafter with its eyes shut against the beam, its feathers still tinted with the colours of the wet paper, and it looked exactly as if it had been dipped in the sky and left out to dry.