Black and grey realism tattoo of a large raven with open beak, with a second feathered bird below it, across the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Large raven with a second bird on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large raven with its beak open sits in profile, with its feathers rendered in fine black shading and white highlights. Below it, a second bird with pale, detailed feathers is partly tucked behind the raven's wing. The photograph is a side-by-side pair of the same torso, showing the tattoo in black and grey across the ribs.

Realism Blackwork Ribs Raven Crow Bird Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the urn's still warm and I've not finished my tea. You all think I've forgotten the boy who sat by the coat pegs. I haven't. Peter Quayle, the loudest mouth in Form Four, who answered every question before Mr Hobbs had reached the end of it. We called him the Raven, though his mother called him Peter and his dad called him nothing at all.

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Nobody noticed the pale lad, Tom Eliot, who never once raised his hand. He kept a white feather in his pencil case, pulled from a pigeon the milkman's cat had got, and he pressed it flat between the pages of his atlas so it wouldn't bend. Every break Peter held court on the wall by the bike shed, shouting about football and the Queen and the price of chips, and Tom sat tucked under his elbow, listening. Nobody asked Tom what he thought. Peter never did either.

In the spring of our last year, Peter copied Tom's maths and then stood up and swore blind it was his own work, loud enough to rattle the windows. Tom said nothing. Mr Hobbs gave Tom the detention. Peter shouted all the way down the lane, and Tom walked home by the back road with the feather in his blazer pocket, and that was the last time they spoke.

Peter came into the hall last month and asked me where Tom had ended up. I told him, and he stood by the trestle tables a long while with his mouth open and nothing coming out, which is the first time in forty years I've known him quiet.