Solid black flying raven with spread wings, drawn in a painterly blackwork style on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying raven silhouette in black

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single bird in flight is shown in solid black, with its wings spread upward and its body angled to the right. The edges of the feathers are ragged and textured, with flecks of white showing through the dark areas, which suggests a brushed or inked finish. The bird is centred on a plain white background with no colour or other elements.

Blackwork Bird Raven Flying Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw had not come to Halloway Farm by the second week of February, and Mabel Crane had run out of patience before she ran out of coal. She went out to the top field with the lamb in a sack under her arm, because the ewe had refused it, and because the raven had been sitting on the gatepost all morning watching her with one eye like a shut purse.

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Her father had told her as a girl that ravens carried the dead's last breath up to the roof of the sky, and that a farm which fed one through a hard winter would never want for a spring. She had thought it was the sort of thing men said to get children out of bed. Now she set the lamb down in the straw of the lean-to and tipped a handful of oats onto the flat stone by the gate, and the bird dropped off the post in a rush of black and came down beside the grain without a sound.

It ate with its head low. When it finished it did not fly. It walked to the door of the lean-to and looked at the lamb, then at her, and opened its beak as though to speak. Nothing came out but a clicking, and then the bird lifted, wings spread wide and ragged against the grey, and climbed over the hedge towards Scarrow Wood.

Mabel stood in the cold until she could not feel her hands. Two days later the rain came in off the moors, soft and warm, and the ewe went to the lamb on her own. Mabel never did learn whose breath the bird had carried, only that the gatepost stayed bare after that, and the stone by the gate was clean for the first time in a month.