Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental raven line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A raven or crow is shown in side profile, perched with its head turned and wings folded. Its body is filled with dense, flowing linework, swirls, scrolls and small curled motifs that create patterns of light and dark across the bird. The drawing is in black ink on a pale beige, textured paper, with the figure centred and fully visible.

Raven Crow Bird Swirl Scroll Ornamental pattern Linework

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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

Brother Aldric has left the inkwell open again, and by the time you notice, the crow has already walked across the vellum, leaving three neat prints in the gall-black. You flick it off the page with the back of your quill. It hops to the sill, tilts its head at you as though you are the one who has trespassed, and waits.

Keep reading

For a month the bird keeps you company through the offices. It sits on the lectern while the psalms are read and watches the abbot's sleeve. When you draw the initial for the Feast of Saint Cuthbert, a great curling D that must hold a whole vine of leaves, it hops along the margin and pecks at the spirals you have just finished, as if testing whether they are alive. The novices swear they have seen nothing. The prior says ravens have always nested in the bell tower, and that it is bad luck to shoo them.

On the last night of the copying, the lamp burns down to a bead and you realise the crow has stopped moving. Its wing is folded over a patch of parchment you left blank for the colophon, and the lines of its body seem to have crept out of the feathers into the margin, knotting into scrolls you did not draw. You reach for your pen to tidy them and find the ink already dry, the page already full, every curl finished in a hand you do not recognise, and the bird gone from the sill.