Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knotwork raven in flight

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised raven with its wings spread is shown in side view, flying to the right. Its body and feathers are filled with solid black shapes and interlaced knotwork bands, with thin white lines separating the sections. The image is a flat, high-contrast black and white drawing with no shading or colour, set against a plain white background.

Blackwork Raven Bird Knotwork Spiral Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird had been on the church roof since before the banns were read, and Mrs Hollis swore it was the same raven that had watched her own wedding in 1961, though she was ninety and said a great many things. I was the one who had to climb the ladder to fetch the ring cushion from the gutter, so I had a closer look at it than anyone.

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Its wings were cut from black slate, banded with knots that went over and under themselves like rope in a dock. Where the feathers met, a thin line of white had been left, the way a plasterer leaves a seam. Tom Garside, who was marrying Ellen Price that Saturday, wanted the ring carried up the aisle in the beak, a bit of nonsense he'd read in a book of his grandfather's. Nobody had told him ravens don't do what they're asked.

The bird did, in the end. When Ellen's brother tied the ring to a length of blue ribbon and hung it from the lych gate, the raven came off the roof in one long sweep, took the ribbon without touching the bunting, and flew it straight to the altar rail, where it dropped the ring into Tom's palm like a pebble into a pond. Then it turned and went back up over the yews, black against grey sky, pulling its knots tight behind it.

Ellen said that was the first honest thing anyone had done all day. I think she meant the bird. I have kept that ribbon in my sewing box ever since, and every October it still smells faintly of the sea.