Detailed black and grey drawing of two owls arranged as a yin yang circle, one with a yellow eye, in a Realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang owls in a circle

Realism · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows two owls fitted together inside a circle, one a pale barn owl with a dark pupil and the other a darker owl with a bright yellow eye. The feathers are built up with fine hatching, stippling and dense textured shading, giving strong detail on both birds. The background is plain light grey, and the only colour is the yellow eye against the otherwise monochrome drawing.

Realism Owl Barn owl Yin yang Feather Eye Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harker had climbed the clock tower stairs every night since her father's chest gave out, winding the great movement by hand because the motor had been condemned in March. The lamp at the top of the ladder threw her shadow across the iron gears. Somewhere above the louvres, the owls were calling to each other across the rooftops of Carrick Street.

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There were two of them. The pale one nested in the belfry and ignored her, but the dark one with the sulphur eye came down onto the rail each night at eleven and waited for the bell to strike. Her father had said they were a pair, though they never seemed to sit close. He had kept a ledger of their visits in pencil, with a circle drawn beside each date: one circle for a night when one of them came, two when both did.

On the last Thursday of October, only the dark owl came. It hunched on the rail, turning its head toward the empty louvre where the pale one should have been. Nell climbed out and found the pale bird on the pavement below, one wing folded wrong, its feathers dark with rain. She carried it up inside her coat. When she set it on the rail beside its mate, the dark owl leaned its head against the pale one's, and the two faces, one moon and one shadow, closed into a single round shape against the stars.

She drew the circle in the ledger that night, then sat with the pencil until the clock struck midnight, the hands and the birds and the sleeping city all keeping the same time.