Black and grey tattoo of a raven head within knotwork wings, with an eight-armed symbol above it, on the upper back.

Raven and knotwork wings on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tattoo shows a raven's head at the centre, framed by two wings filled with interlaced Celtic-style knotwork. A symbol with eight radiating arms, each ending in small tines, sits above the bird. The design uses solid black fills with grey shading and fine outlines, set against pale skin on the upper back.

Blackwork Back Raven Bird Knotwork Wing Celtic knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday and the lane up to Hollin Gate was gone under it. My father kept the inn for forty years and never once hung a lamp out into weather, but that January he set one on the iron bracket by the stable door, because the raven had come back to the yard rail and would not leave.

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Nobody in the valley kept ravens. Bran Oakes said they were carrion birds and bad luck to feed, so I left it scraps of mutton every morning and it watched me with one eye like a coin. On the third night a carter came in half frozen, a man called Tobias Reed, with a sack of letters and no idea where he was. He had a pencilled star of eight arms folded in his coat, the kind old sailors scratched inside their chests. A woman in Kendal had drawn it for him, he said, so he would not lose his way on the fells. I told him the raven had come first.

We sat by the fire while the wind worked at the shutters. He tilted the sketch toward the grate and the lines seemed to shift in the flicker, every arm pointing somewhere different. Outside, the bird knocked once on the glass, then settled on the wall beside the lamp with its wings half open, the feathers knotted into the shape of the lane.

At first light the drifts had moved, and the lane lay plain as a ribbon from the gate to the road. Tobias left before the church bells, and the raven went with him, rising over the stable roof and bending west. I still have his sketch on the mantel. The arms point at my door.