Black and grey tattoo of a solid crow silhouette perched on a stack of open books, shown on a limb of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crow perched on open books

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black crow silhouette with outstretched wings sits on top of a stack of open, shaded books with curled page edges. The books are drawn with fine outlines and grey shading that gives them depth, while the bird is filled in solid black for strong contrast. The image is a close, straight-on photo of the tattoo against plain skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crow came aboard at Sallow Lock on the third wet morning of the Ashby run, and by the time we reached the tunnel it had claimed the cabin roof and the account books with equal rights. Hester Vane, who kept the Marigold's books in a stack beside the tiller, tried to shoo it off with a wet cloth. It hopped onto the open ledger instead and stood there, one black foot on a column of coal weights, looking at her as if she were the one who had strayed onto its page.

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Hester had learned her letters from a bargee's Bible and her sums from the tally of lock fees, and she did not trust a bird that could read. Yet every evening after that the crow waited on the stack while she worked, and every morning she found a line of her figures tidied, a carry-over struck through with one neat peck. Her husband Abel laughed and said the bird was a clerk sacked from a counting house in Birmingham for drinking the ink.

In the autumn a broker's man came aboard at Stoke to dispute a delivery of seventeen tons. Hester had only her memory and a column of figures that did not match his. The crow flew down from the cabin roof, landed on the open page, and walked along one line with its beak, stopping at a sum she had written badly in a hurry. The broker's man looked at the bird, then at her, and went very quiet.

They paid her the difference that week. Abel never got the crow off the books, and when the Marigold was sold for scrap the next spring, the last thing Hester took ashore was the ledger, with a single black feather pressed flat where the honest sums ended.

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