Black and grey forearm tattoo of a raven head above a human face in profile, with a small red beak accent and a dagger with a red blade at the lower left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and face with dagger on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A raven's head and body sit above and behind a human face in profile, with the eyes and features shaded in fine grey tones. A dagger or blade with a red-tinted edge and a hilt runs diagonally across the lower left of the design. The linework is solid and the shading is smooth, with black ink dominating and small areas of red used on the beak and blade.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fence posts had been counting down since the last town, and by the time the tarmac gave out to gravel you had stopped pretending the bird on the third post was a coincidence. It sat with its head cocked, watching the car the way a customer watches a clock. When you slowed, it did not fly. It only turned its head, and behind the sheen of its eye was something that was not a bird's patience.

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The woman was waiting at the cattle grid, one hand on her hip and the other holding a blade with a dark red edge, as if the steel had been dipped in something that had not quite dried. She said her name was Marrow Quayle, that she had sold the road to a man in a grey suit forty years back, and that the road was tired of him. She asked you to carry the knife across the flats wrapped in a feed sack. Nobody else could be trusted with it, she said, because the knife remembered every hand it had passed through.

You drove on with the sack on the passenger seat. At the dry lake the road simply stopped, a fork with no signs and no tracks going either way. You pulled up and the raven landed on the sack, pecked a hole through the hessian and fixed you with a look that was far too patient for a bird. It said, in a voice like a closing door, that the blade was not yours to keep. Plant it in the salt and the road would be only a road again. You did, and the steel went in easily.

When you looked back, the grid and the posts were gone. In the wing mirror a woman stood on the white flats with red at the corners of her mouth, smiling as though she had got the better of the bargain. Far above, a black shape circled once and then went on.

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