Black and grey flash design of two mirrored crows above blue-grey lilies, an eye and a jawbone, set within dotted geometric circles and lines, with no body placement shown.

Mirrored birds, lilies and eye design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Two mirrored black crows face each other at the top of the composition, with fine engraved feathering and small white eyes. Below them, symmetrical lily blooms and foliage frame a stippled eye, and a jawbone sits at the base, all linked by dotted circles, triangles and a hexagon. The artwork uses black ink with pale blue-grey shading on an off-white background, arranged in a strict vertical symmetry.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Crow Raven Bird Lily Flower Eye Circle Hexagon Symmetry Foliage

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down nearer the stove, the six-forty is late again and the wind has nothing better to do than rattle that signal. You want the crows? Everyone wants the crows. Two of them sat on the gantry above Carrick Junction every morning through a hard winter, facing each other like a pair of clerks who had quarrelled over the same ledger and would not admit it.

Keep reading

Old Mrs Pryce ran the lamp room then. She carried white lilies up from her garden in a jam jar and set them on the sill of the signal box, and the crows would drop down and pick at the stamens until the petals browned. She said they were counting the trains. Every engine that left, one of them tipped its head, and every engine that came in, the other did. Nobody believed her until the spring the eye turned up.

The eye was a brass thing the size of a pocket watch, left in the ballast by surveyors after they measured the new curve. Pryce found it, rubbed it bright on her apron and set it in the window where the lilies had been. The crows went quiet for a week. Then a jawbone surfaced where the old footbridge used to stand, all teeth and hollow sockets, and the signalman swore it had been lying there longer than the railway itself.

The last night of the timetable, the crows lifted off the gantry together and nobody saw them land. In the morning the jar still stood on the sill with two white petals floating in it, and the brass eye was gone. Somewhere down the line, for the first time in forty years, the six-forty came in on time.