Black and grey realism tattoo of a face-painted portrait with a raven above and feathers, shown on the forearm from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Face-painted portrait with raven on arm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realism portrait tattoo of a man with vertical face paint lines, a dark raven perched above his head, and feather and bead details at the side. Shading is smooth and detailed, with strong contrast in the face and feathers. The image shows three views of the same forearm piece side by side, all in black and grey ink.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came in through the scullery window the morning Mrs Hebden sent for me, and by the time I had my easel up it was perched on the back of the chair where my sitter would sit, watching my brushes as though it had been commissioned first. The housekeeper swore it had been there since dawn and would not be shifted with a broom, so I set my palette on the sill and began with the drawing, black chalk on grey paper, the way my master taught me in Newcastle.

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The sitter came down the stairs at ten, a ferrywoman who had worked the Tyne crossing since her husband drowned off the Low Light. She had lamp-black ground into two stripes down each cheek, not for any ceremony she said, only because it kept the sun out of her eyes on the water, and a string of jet beads at her throat that clicked when she turned her head. She did not look at the bird once. I found I could not look at anything else.

I painted her for three days, and each morning the raven was there before me, and each evening it was gone before I could ask where it went. On the last afternoon I gave up on the chair and painted the bird in the corner of the canvas, black on black, so faint that only the lamplight picked it out. When I showed her, she laughed for the first time, a short hard sound. "He always did want his name on the job," she said. The portrait dried in the cold room over the weekend. When I went to fetch it on Monday, the chair was empty and the scullery window was shut, but the bird I had painted was still there in the corner, and I have never been able to paint it out.

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