Black and grey blackwork bird tattoo with a geometric patterned body on the forearm, shown across three photographs.

Geometric bird on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A perched bird with a dark head, hooked beak and long feathered tail fills the forearm, shown in three photographs from different angles. The body is filled with a three-dimensional cube pattern, while the tail feathers use bold outlines and layered hatching. The image is in black and grey with strong contrast against a pale background.

Blackwork Geometric Dotwork Forearm Bird Raven Feather Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came to the dance hall at Saltings the winter the boards were relaid, and it took the highest beam above the fiddlers as if it had paid the rent. Nobody drove it off. Old Mother Crane said a bird that sat that high had earned its perch, and it ate the moths that gathered round the lamps and did no harm to the floor.

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Hester Pell called the reels that year, and she was the only one who noticed how the raven watched. It never looked at faces. It counted feet. At the end of every dance it shifted its weight and tipped its head as though it had finished a sum. One night, with the hall stinking of wet wool and paraffin, Hester climbed the ladder to the beam with a square of tin in her apron pocket, cut from the lid of her mother's biscuit box.

"Tell me who Will Dunning will marry," she said. The raven looked at the tin and then at her hands. It took the square in its beak and turned it so the lamplight broke across it into a little stack of blocks, one inside another, like a room that opened two ways at once. "Not you," it said, in a voice like a rusty hinge. "Not the girl you're watching either. Dance with the man in the blue coat at the last reel, and keep your tin."

She did. Will Dunning stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and went home alone. The man in the blue coat was a surveyor from the market town who talked all night about the angles of roofs, and by spring Hester had stopped calling reels and started keeping house for him. At dawn on the last morning of the dance season the beam was empty and the tin lay on the sill. The lamplight had left a faint pattern of squares in the dust beside it, the kind you only see if you look from the side.