Celtic knot raven in flight

The raven came back this morning, the bold one with the grey feather at its throat, and sat on the sill of the scriptorium as though it had paid for the window. Abbot Fintan wants it shot. I told him a bird that sits still long enough to be counted is worth more than the ink it steals, and he did not laugh, which I took as a yes.

I have nearly finished the great initial for the psalter meant for the abbot's jubilee, the one you said would never be done. Every line of the interlace passes over and under the next, so a pen that lifts once has lost its way. Last week I could not get the wing right. I kept drawing it flat, like a banner on a pole. Then I watched the bird leave the wall and saw the wing does not beat at all. It opens, its feathers fanning into curls that wind back toward the body like rope coming off a drum.

So I drew that. The spirals start at the shoulder and run out to the tips, each feather ending in a scroll no thicker than a hair, and where two lines cross I let the bird pass through them as though they were nothing. The head I turned to look back over the left shoulder, toward the door, the way it always looks when it is deciding whether to stay.

Yesterday it stayed to watch me finish the claws. When I dipped my pen for the last curl, it leant down, took the wet tip of a feather in its beak and ran off across the roof with my best black. I have not forgiven it, but I have not stopped looking for it either.

Yours in the ink-bottle, Colm