Neo-trad style tattoo of a black crow in flight with yellow, orange and red circles and white rain strokes, with partial script below, on an upper arm and shoulder.

Crow in flight with rain on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs show a large black crow with outstretched wings across the upper arm and shoulder, with white dashed strokes suggesting falling rain. Soft grey shading gives the wings a painterly finish, and the body is filled with overlapping yellow, orange, teal and red circles. Partial lettering reading It can't rain all... sits beneath the bird's feet.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Crow Bird Rain Circle Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamar had kept the rain tally on the granary wall for eleven summers, one notched stroke for every day the sky gave water, and the stroke for this spring was still raw from the knife when the crow landed on the sill. It was a big black thing with its wings held wide, as if it had been caught mid-fall through a shutter, and it studied the notches the way a moneylender studies a ledger.

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Her father had said the crow belonged to the north wind, who sent it south each year to see whether the hill town of Ashkel had earned its harvest. Tamar did not trust gods who kept accounts, but she trusted tallies, and through the winter she had pressed dried figs into small suns, six to a tray, so the children could count the dry days without the schoolmaster's rod. The crow ate one, swallowed it whole, then hopped down and scratched a line in the dust beneath the granary door with one black foot.

She crouched to read it. The letters were crooked and half blown away: It can't rain all. The rest had gone to dust in the night, or perhaps the bird had only meant to leave her the beginning. Tamar took the chalk from her apron pocket and finished the sentence for it, all the time, then lined up the last fig on the sill beside the notches.

The crow lifted off with a clatter of wings that flung grit into her eyes. When she blinked, the first drop of rain had struck the chalk and smeared the final word into a grey cloud, and the children were already running out from the houses, arms wide, shouting the old count of the days in the wrong order.