Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bird in flight on a person's upper back, its wing blending into a bare tree and a leaf.

Bird in flight merging into a tree on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a bird with outstretched wings flying across the upper back, with its wing shading into a bare branching tree and a leaf at the lower left. The work uses dense black and grey fills with fine branch linework and a stippled, textured effect on the wing and leaf. The dark background sets off the design, which is shown in black and grey against pale skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Bird Raven Tree Branches Leaf Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apple season was late that year, and the keeper at Hollins End had stopped counting the windfalls. Her father had counted them, and her grandmother before him with a notched stick, and both said the raven that lived in the dead elm at the far wall never took more than its share. So when the bird came down one morning in August, one wing trailing through the grass, Nell Harrow knew it was not hungry.

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It hopped to the trunk of the old Bramley and looked at her with one eye. Her rule about strange birds was to leave them be, but the wing was torn at the joint and the feathers had gone grey at the tips, the way leaves do before they let go. She fetched the salve from the dairy shelf. The bird let her work it into the bone with her thumb, and when she was finished it said, in her grandmother's voice, 'Now the tree owes you.'

Nell laughed and went back to the ladders. But the elm at the wall put out no leaves that autumn, and the Bramley, which had not fruited in living memory, hung so heavy the props creaked. She understood the bargain only at the first frost, when the raven lifted from the grass and its wings opened wide and black over the ridge. Where the left one had been, a crown of bare twigs stood up against the sky, and clinging to its lowest branch was one brown leaf.

Each year after that, Nell found a single leaf pressed flat on the dairy step before the frost came, and the Bramley bent low with fruit. She never once saw the raven land again. She only ever saw its shadow cross the orchard grass, slow and heavy, as though carrying something it meant to return.