Pencil and ink sketch of a raven head with dotwork shading, set within overlapping triangles and circles, drawn as a tattoo design on a sketchbook page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric raven head design sketch

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a raven or crow head in profile, with its eye and beak clearly defined. The feathers and head are built from stippled dots and fine hatched lines, with solid dark areas breaking into angular triangles. Thin geometric outlines of a triangle and circles frame the bird, and small scattered triangles sit below it on a white sketchbook page.

Geometric Dotwork Raven Crow Bird Triangle Circle Geometric shape Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the fortieth day out of Valparaíso the raven had stopped stealing biscuits and started stealing my dividers. I found them in its nest of rope ends behind the binnacle, the points bent, and I knew then it was no ordinary ship's bird. Ships' birds sit on the rail and pretend to be ornamental. This one studied the sea the way I did, edge on, as if the water were a sum that might come out differently from another angle.

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Captain Ferreira wanted it over the side. I argued it was the only creature aboard that could tell a triangle from a wedge of cloud, and he gave me a week to prove it. So I taught it, with a stub of pencil and the back of a log sheet, to peck at the three points of our reckoning: the sun, the pole star we could no longer see, and the grey circle of the horizon. It learned quickly. By the Horn it would fetch a pencil from the pot and drop it at my elbow whenever my sums went wrong.

On the last night of the crossing the cloud tore open and the sky went the colour of wet slate. The raven flew to the foot of the mainmast and began worrying at the brass corners of the sea chest, lifting off little shards of metal that scattered in the lamplight like tiny foil triangles. I thought it mad until I saw where they fell, in a ring around a chalk mark I had made on the deck years before, a circle with a point inside it. The bird had simply found our place for us.

At Tierra del Fuego it took one look at the grey mountains, then at my upturned palm, and lifted off without a sound. I watched it cut a neat black wedge against the cloud until it was only a speck, then nothing. Later, scraping the chart clean, I found a single feather tucked between the sheets, its edge ruled as straight as a set square. I have kept it in the logbook ever since, at the page where we first saw land.