Black and grey chest tattoo of a crow on a branch with thistle stems, a Latin banner and a second bird, with faint red and teal bands, placed on the chest and shoulder.

Crow and thistles across a chest

Botanical · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large black and grey crow perches on a branch at the centre of the chest, with a second bird flying at the upper left edge. Thistle stems and seed heads extend across the lower chest beside a banner reading VULNERANT OMNES ULTIMA NECAT, above a row of small script marks. Fine sketchy linework and soft grey shading sit over faint red and teal horizontal bands that give the piece a collage feel.

Botanical Chest Crow Raven Bird Thistle Branch Banner Latin text Script Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, and mind the cat, she thinks the bread is hers. You want the one about the crow in Mrs Pennock's back parlour? Well. The house on Gull Terrace had eleven rooms and a bird in every one of them, if you counted the stuffed ones, and Mrs Pennock counted them every Sunday after chapel.

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The crow came in the winter the thistles went to seed. Nobody saw the door open. It was simply sitting on the brass rail of the bed in number four when the lodger, a surveyor from Leeds with a bad cough, woke up and said good morning to it. The crow looked at him the way a magistrate looks at a man who has been caught with the spoons. Then it flew out through the gap under the window sash, which had been painted shut since the Jubilee, and the lodger swore it left a thistle head on the pillow.

He pinned the seed head to the wall above his bed with a hatpin, and under it he wrote, in a hand gone wobbly from the cold, the Latin on the old brass plate the surveyor had stolen from a church roof in Hull: vulnerant omnes, ultima necat. All wound, the last one kills. Mrs Pennock said it was a bad sort of motto for a boarding house, and she was right, and he paid his rent in full for six more weeks regardless. The thistles grew up through the floorboards that spring, purple and mean, and the crow came back every morning to sit with them. Go on, eat your crust. I'm getting to the bit where it leaves.