Black and grey raven and peony flower tattoo running from the shoulder down the upper arm, in a fine line botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and peony sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A raven or crow head and folded wing sit at the shoulder, with stems, leaves and layered peony blooms descending down the upper arm. The work uses fine black linework with stippled and hatched shading to give the feathers and petals depth. The image is in black and grey and is framed from the shoulder to the upper arm against a plain pale background, with the subject's face out of frame.

Botanical Fine line Shoulder Upper arm Raven Bird Wing Peony Flower Leaves Foliage Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came to the sill of Ward Seven at three, the way it always did when the corridor lights were dimmed and Nurse Agnes Penhale was the only one awake to notice. She didn't shoo it. Her grandmother had told her that a raven on a ward was a sentry, and a sentry was no bad thing when the night was long and the sleepers were many.

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Outside the window, under the car park lamp, grew a bed of peonies that the old matron had planted before the war. Nobody in the town could say why they still bloomed in October, but the porter, Tobias Wren, swore they only flowered where someone was keeping watch. He had carried a root in his coat pocket for thirty years, he said, and never once taken a cold.

Mr Halloran in bed four woke gasping just after the bell for half past. Agnes went to him with the cup of water and the pale tablet, and he stared past her at the window. "That bird's been with my wife," he said quietly. "Every night since Easter."

Agnes did not argue. She drew the curtain back a little so the raven could see him, and it turned its head, black eye bright as a pin, and folded its wing the way a person folds a letter they mean to keep. The old man slept. By the time the sky greyed over the car park, the raven was gone, and one peony at the edge of the bed had opened, wide and heavy, as if it had been waiting for the light to be sure everyone had made it through.