I had the same problem with my half sleeve koi. It was my first big tattoo (only had a latin script on my forearm) I had a beautiful reference that I gave to my artist to work from and make my own. He then showed me another picture of a koi that was different, but I said looked good. And pretty much the same story as yours rocketqueen. I should have spoken up about every little thing that annoyed me. But I didn’t, cause I trusted their judgment more than my own. I didn’t really know about tattooing, I was new to it. I just thought it would turn out ok.

The story gets better in that the artist wasn’t exactly truthful about his skills too. Him and his wife worked together and when I asked him how much experience he had, there was a pause and he said 15 years. Turns out he just added on the few months he had been doing this to his wife’s 14 and half years. There are mistakes I will always have to live with and I wasn’t happy for months after that. it has taken me about 2 years but eventually you get used it. The tattoos seem to build their own personality and become part of your uniqueness. Bottom line is you got to be straight up with what you want. To every line and dot. my full sleeve Asian dragon came out very well and I am very happy with. Cause I pretty much pointed out and told him where to put the needle and how much to shade each and every step of the way.

The Koi, I had reworked and edited. the design stayed the same, just fixed the shading and added in some colour. The only problem I have with it now is it is to dark (original untruthful artist used black instead of the deep grey I wanted for the wind bars) and he botched up the wind bars so they aren’t really wind bars either.
Once you get your other animal faces around your owl, you will be happier. I just had a chrysanthemum added two weeks ago and extended the black bars to wrap around my arm. More imagery and ink make everything look better and feel better.

For what it is worth, when I saw your owl – I thought it was absolutely beautiful. there are no problems, no bad workmanship, everything is proportional, shading is great and it will develop its own kind of “personality” on you. And you will start to love it more than your reference. It will take time as your mind adjusts and gets used to it. Whenever you feel like regretful, just think that it could have been a lot worse. Just google “bad owl tattoos’ and you will realise how much you have to love haha.