Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a raven in flight on a person's upper back, with its wing and body formed from a bare tree.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and bare tree on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A raven spreads its wings in flight across the upper back, with the bare branches of a tree forming its body and one wing. The linework is built from stippled dots and fine etched texture, with dense black shading in the bird's wing and darker areas of the tree. The image is black and grey and framed closely on the shoulder blade, with the person's hair pulled up and their face not shown.

Dotwork Back Raven Crow Bird Tree Wing Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last oak above the ferry landing had died in the storm the year the church bell cracked, and nobody would fell it. Its branches stood up grey against the sky like the ribs of a wrecked boat. Each dawn a raven came down from the bare crown and perched on the lowest limb, and each dawn Maud Tallow, who kept the ferry, told it the same thing: the river is not yours to cross.

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The raven had come with the flood, the story went, a black wing torn from some drowned thing, with a tree grown up through the feathers. Nobody on the south bank could say which was bird and which was wood. When the ice came, the village children dared each other to touch the wing. It was cold as slate, and the feathers shifted though there was no wind.

In the hard February the ferry stopped. Maud's son had gone across for medicine and not come back, and the river ran black with floes. At first light she went down to the landing and the raven was already waiting, lifting from the branches and dropping onto the water beside the stern. It did not sink. It walked the surface with its wings spread, the bare limbs of its body clicking like knuckles, and turned its head towards the ice as if asking her to follow.

She rowed behind it all morning. When the boat grounded on the far shore she found her son sitting by a driftwood fire, alive, his boots frozen to the stones. The raven rose once over the water and shadowed the whole sky with its wing before it went grey into the cloud. After that Maud stopped telling the children to keep away from it, and let them touch the wing instead.