Sheet of black ink crow and raven silhouettes in varied flight and perching poses, drawn on white paper as tattoo flash.

Ink crow silhouettes flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A white sheet holds about twelve loose ink silhouettes of crows or ravens, shown in flight, perched and landing poses. The brushwork is ragged and textured, with feathers rendered as broken wedges of solid black and no fine internal detail. The birds are scattered across the page with generous white space between them, and the photograph is taken at a slight angle under dim light.

Crow Raven Bird Silhouette Flight Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had held the ploughed field since Tuesday, and by the time you reached the bottom gate the crows were already up off the furrows, a ragged scatter of them tearing across the grey as if someone had flicked ink at the sky. Old Haddow used to say you could tell the season by them. You never bothered. You had a bucket of swedes in one hand and the other buried in your coat, and the ewes were shouting from the lee of the barn.

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Haddow's son had sold the ground in November, and the new people wanted the hedges cut back and the rooks gone. You said nothing at the meeting in the village hall. You sat at the back with your cap on your knee and watched the agent draw a diagram on the flip chart, all arrows and no sheep. Now you carried the swedes across the yard, past the tractor sunk to its hubs in mud, and set the bucket down by the trough where the water had skinned over at the edges.

When you turned back, the birds had settled on the far hedge, nine or ten of them, sitting like punctuation on a page nobody would read. One lifted, then another, and then the whole handful was pouring over the barn roof in every direction at once, wings broken into wedges against the white sky. You stood with the gate rope in your fist and let them go over you. You did not count them.

That night the lamb pen was open and the chain lay in the straw, unhooked by something with patience. Nothing was missing except the tin bucket. In the morning there were black marks pressed into the snow where something had stood and then gone, and the crows were back on the hedge as though they had only stepped out. You left the gate off its latch after that. It seemed the least you could do for birds that always knew when you were looking.