Crow with banded body in traditional style

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A side-profile crow stands on thin legs with its head turned left and a pale beak. Solid black feather shapes are edged with sharp, jagged points, and the shading is built from stippled dots and fading greys. Two white bands wrap around the head and the body, and a row of small scale-like marks sits on the wing, all set against a plain mottled grey background.

Traditional Dotwork Crow Raven Bird Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crow was already sitting on the dashboard when you reached the last pump at Mercy Wells, its head cocked at the heat shimmering over the flats as if it had been asked to judge it. Old Mrs Abernethy at the counter said it had come in through the open door of the post room and would not be shooed, so she had bound it with two strips of white cloth, one round its neck and one round its middle, and handed it to you with the dead letters and a flask of cold tea. 'Keep him still,' she said. 'He'll only try to fly off with the mail.'

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So you drove. The road ran straight as a ruled line through country that had no interest in being crossed, and the crow kept its pale beak pointed west and said nothing for eighty miles. Once, when a hawk slid over the windscreen, it turned its whole body on the dash to watch, and the bands creaked against its black feathers. You noticed how neatly its jagged plumage stacked, each feather sharp as a cut card, and how its scaled wing stayed folded like a shut purse.

Near dusk the bottle-tree shade gave out and the road began to climb. You stopped at the top of the ridge, where a tin sign read Paradise, Nine Miles, and someone had painted a pair of wings beneath it. The sun was flat and copper. You reached over and loosened the band around the crow's middle, then the one at its throat.

It did not fly off. It shook itself once, from beak to tail, and stepped onto the sill of the open window as if it had all the time in the world. Then it dropped a folded letter onto your knee, sealed in red wax and addressed in a hand you had not seen for years, and lifted into the copper light towards Paradise.