Solid black silhouette of a crow perched on bare branches wrapping around the wrist, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crow on branches across a wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black crow sits on a thin branch that wraps around the inside of the wrist, with smaller twigs extending outward. The ink is bold and filled with clean edges, with no visible shading or fine detail beyond the silhouette. The photograph is taken from above on a teal-tinted glass surface, with the hand and dark-painted nails in the lower half of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Crow Bird Branch Silhouette Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crow came to the pit head the winter the seam flooded, and it did not leave when the men did. Every morning Mrs Hartley's boy carried her dinner in a tin up the hill past the winding wheel, and every morning the bird sat on the same bare ash tree by the gate, black as a coal lump, watching him come and go.

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The overman said it was bad luck to feed a crow at a pit, and Mrs Hartley said the overman had never once fed anybody who wasn't paying him. So the boy crumbed his bread on the gatepost. The crow took the crumbs and cocked its head at him, and when the shift whistle went at four it flew down to the lamp room roof and waited there with its feathers puffed against the cold.

On the morning the cage went down with six men in it, the bird did not come to the gate. The boy went up the hill with the tin and found the tree empty. He stood there a long while. Then he heard a tapping from the wet slate of the screening house, and there it was, on a snapped branch that had come down in the night, calling once, flat and plain, the way it called to say the men were coming up.