Black and grey tattoo of a raven perched above an anatomical heart with a black cat seated in front, in an engraved linework style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and black cat over an anatomical heart

Black and grey · Photo

A raven perches on the top of an anatomical heart, with a seated black cat in front of the heart on the lower right. The linework is fine and engraved, with dense stippling and hatching that builds the shadows and feathers. The image is monochrome and tightly cropped, so the body area is not identifiable.

Raven Crow Anatomical heart Heart Cat Black cat

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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

Mind the step, it has been sinking since my grandmother's time, and the council keeps promising new concrete once the rain stops. Sit down. The cat has the good cushion and the raven has the lamp, so you will have to take the cold stool like a guest should.

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Below us, under the glass floor of the Vessel Ward, the heart of Harrowgate Deep is still beating. Nobody alive has seen the whole of it. We see the ribs of its valves through the glass, grey and veined like old engraving, and we hear it through the pipes. For forty years I kept the count. Ledger, the raven, kept it with me, tapping the rail with his beak at every fourth beat, which is the only way I ever learned to trust a clock.

One winter the tapping slowed. Ledger sat on the top of the great chamber and would not move, and Mordant, who has never once in her life come when called, walked down the iron stairs by herself and sat in front of the valve, looking up at it with her green eyes as if she were the one owed an explanation. I followed her. There was a hairline crack in the third chamber, weeping a thin silver line, and the beat was catching on it like a boot on a loose board.

I bound it with copper thread and my own wax, and the heart went on. When I climbed back up, the city lamps were flickering in time with it, first one street, then the next, all the way down to the sea. The cat only blinked at me. The bird, for once, said nothing at all.