Black and grey pen drawing of an owl split into a yin yang circle, with one pale eye and one yellow eye, as a tattoo design.

Yin yang owl design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A circular design divides into two owls, one showing a large pale eye with radiating lines and the other a smaller yellow eye framed by feathers. The left half is densely stippled and hatched, while the right half uses finer shading, sparse spots and feather outlines. Black ink dominates on a cream background, with the yellow iris as the only colour accent.

Realism Owl Yin yang Eye Feather Circle

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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

You reach Hollin Gap an hour before the light, when the snow has stopped but the wind has not. The carter who sold you the mule said the pass belonged to two owls, one that kept the grey hours and one that kept the dark, and that in forty years he had never seen them on the same post. You tie the mule to a hawthorn and climb the last of the scree with your lamp shut off, because he said a lamp only makes owls stare.

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On the cairn at the top there are two of them, sitting close as a pair of cups. The pale one has a face like a dish of milk, and its eye is wide and black, ringed with fine rays like the spokes of a cartwheel. The other is squat and mottled, and its eye is yellow as a struck match. Neither moves. You understand that the pass will only let you through if you choose which one to speak to first, and you have no idea which is the day bird and which the night.

You wish the pale one good morning, out of politeness, and the yellow-eyed one shuts its lids. A gust comes up off the valley and the snow on the cairn shivers loose. The pale owl leans, and its feathers pour over the edge of the stone and become the other owl's wing, until you cannot tell where one bird ends. The carter had told you this part too: they were never two creatures, only one shape turning on itself to let the dawn in.

The sky greys behind the peaks. The yellow eye opens. You step past them onto the path down, and when you look back the cairn holds a single round shadow, dark on one side and pale on the other, rolling slowly west toward the night.